"Ghastliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be of influence in determining not only the fate of his own people, but also the fate of the civilized community at large. I see approaching him, when this war is over, an opportunity far greater than anything fate has yet placed in his way. The world will be shuddering at the ghastliness of its recent experiences and asking if there is no way of guarding against the possibility of such a catastrophe in the years ahead. Among all the nations lately at war there will be but one desire—namely, the insuring of the enjoyment ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... figures a good deal less than life. But sure they are amazing! I don't know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures excel all I have seen in Paris and England. The figure of the dead man who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain and cursing. A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to me of this picture C'est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois. Another, who showed me relics in one of their churches, expressed as much ridicule ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... dotards will contend with boys in those performances in which boys must always excel them, if they will dress crippled limbs in embroidery, endeavour at gayety with faltering voices, and darken assemblies of pleasure with the ghastliness of disease, they may well expect those who find their diversions obstructed will hoot them away; and that if they descend to competition with youth, they must bear the insolence of successful ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... to school—I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... knives, and fell in a fearful struggle. Wetzel unhurt was no match for the wounded Indian, who sat astride of him with his knife lifted when Wetzel's dog sprung at his throat. Wetzel now flung him off, and while the dog held him helpless, easily dispatched him. Another story is of the usual ghastliness relieved by a touch of the comic. Colonel Robert Elliott was shot by the Indians near the northern line of Hamilton County. One of them sprang upon him to scalp him, but at a touch the poor man's wig came off in his hand. He lifted it and was heard to ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... vast and gasping silence. The young man, too, seemed petrified by the ghastliness of his deed. It took an appreciable interval of time for him, as well as for the onlookers, to realize what he had done. They recovered first, and from a thousand throats the wild Irish yell went up. Red-head won the race without ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... discharge of hail. All sounds were naturally much subdued to my ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward silence ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... on through the dark glen, unmoved by his grisly companions, skeleton Death on the lame horse, and the foul Fiend in person. Contrast this sketch and its thoughtful touching meaning with the hollow ghastliness of ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... hideous at that moment, his face pale to ghastliness and disfigured by the rage he felt, grasped the hilt of his sword with the hand released by de Sigognac, and drew it partly out of its scabbard, as if he meant to attack him, his eyes flashing fire ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... shuddered at that woman. The suitor who could have risked making her child his wife would have been demented, or sublime. And while she maundered on, gulping from her glass, and chuckling at her jests, the ghastliness of it was that, in the gutter face before us, I could trace a likeness to Jeanne; I think Georges must have traced it, too. The menace of heredity was horrible. We were listening to Jeanne wrecked, Jeanne thirty years ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... lonely vigils, he was impressed by the juxtaposition of the minute and the infinitely vast, of the transient and the eternal. He stood looking for some time at the track of the Milky Way, till his gaze plunged into one of those abysms of blackness where no star shines, and the ghastliness of the distance suggested flooded in upon him. This lost and shivering sensation, when the world itself seems to shrink away and send the watcher spinning into the void, is vouchsafed to the astronomer only at rare moments, and from it an escape ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... which "flesh and blood cannot inherit;" but such change would have inflicted no pain, and involved no humiliation; it would only have been a change "from glory to glory;" and would have been anticipated with no sentiments contrary to desire and hope. But death, besides its own inherent ghastliness, is rendered dreadful through the malice of the devil, and the guilty fear of the penal hereafter which haunts all those ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... weeping slave to Heaven! "Oh yes, I'll fly with thee"— Scarce had she said These breathless words when a voice deep and dread As that of MONKER waking up the dead From their first sleep—so startling 'twas to both— Rang thro' the casement near, "Thy oath! thy oath!" Oh Heaven, the ghastliness of that Maid's look!— "'Tis he," faintly she cried, while terror shook Her inmost core, nor durst she lift her eyes, Tho' thro' the casement, now naught but the skies And moonlight fields were seen, calm as before— "'Tis he, and I am his—all, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... black eyes burned like live coals, his cheeks were pallid almost to ghastliness, the muscles of his face ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... name 'Karaz!' And the Genie Karaz came slanting down the night air, like a preying bird, and stood among them. So the hawk cried, 'See, O Karaz, the freshness of thy Princess of Oolb'; and the Genie regarded her till loathing curled his lip, for she grew in ghastliness to the colour of a frog, and a frog's face was hers, a camel's back, a pelican's throat, the legs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... making "Havelocks." It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... feature of his venerable countenance impressed with the character of an affliction which no language could express. He neither spoke nor looked to either side of him, but walked onward in a stupor of grief that was evidently too deep for tears—for he shed none, his face was pale even unto ghastliness, whilst at the same time there was a darkness over it, which evidently proceeded from the gloom of a broken ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... statuette of the diving-girl. After which she stepped back, appraised the effect, and went to open the front door to a large, ill-tempered man in a loose sack suit, and a young man, tall and white to ghastliness, whose nostrils quivered and whose mouth was scarcely ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died—to the place that had held Celia but ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... called in Mrs. Grove, the housekeeper, who had been devotedly attached to Miriam, and we dressed her in a white robe, and scattered fragrant flowers around her, to take away, if possible, the horror and ghastliness of death. She did not look at all like the Miriam I had known and loved. Her features were sharp and pinched, and her face looked careworn, and anxious—if anything so lifeless can be said to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... little, when she had turned to speak to Serafina, who sat beside her, the child woke with a start, and pushing back the mass of dishevelled hair revealed a sad little face, so thin that the cheek bones were painfully prominent, and pale to ghastliness. A pair of magnificent, dark brown eyes, with heavy sweeping lashes, looked preternaturally large in her woe-begone little countenance, and at this moment were filled with wondering admiration, mingled with fierce covetousness, as she stared at Serafina's mock jewels—and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... tombstone. To say that she was green or yellow would ill describe the ghastliness of the tint that suffused her naturally bilious countenance; still speechless, she made a frantic plunge towards the great urn that adorned the head of the grave. Mr. Landale looked up from his reading again with ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hand upon her bosom, still smiling, but with a ghastliness that curdled the blood ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... scene of blood and crime that pure cold eye had rested on; but on few more ghastly than this, where two men, with a lighted corpse between them, waited panting, to kill and be killed. Nor did the moonlight deaden that horrible corpse-light. If anything it added to its ghastliness: for the body sat at the edge of the moonbeam, which cut sharp across the shoulder and the ear, and seemed blue and ghastly and unnatural by the side of that lurid glow in which the face and eyes and teeth shone horribly. But Denys dared ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... puny little soul through all that space. At first it was rather bewildering. Then it grew into something touched with grandeur. Then it took on an aspect of awfulness. And from that it grew into a sort of ghastliness, until the machinery of the mind choked and balked and stopped working altogether, like an overloaded motor. I had to reach out in the cold air and catch hold of Gershom's arm. I felt a hunger to cling ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to move beyond the boundaries ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... now journeying forward, continually descending, along the wilderness of Destruction, through innumerable torments, eternal and not to be described—from cell to cell, from cellar to cellar, and the last always surpassing the others in horror and ghastliness; at last we arrived at a vast porch, more cheerless than any thing we had seen before. It was a very spacious porch, and the pathway through it, which was frightfully steep, led to a kind of dusky nook of incredible ugliness ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... which dignity begins,' he exclaimed; 'further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... the field I stood with Victory, And Death in all its ghastliness—Around The dim watchfires stood like a burning wall Betwixt the dead and living. On that night Ye saw me, ye pure ministers of heaven,— Shone on my anguish and my bitter tears. Then, when the mangled forms of fellow-men, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Legrand had been awaiting us in eager expectation. He grasped my hand with a nervous empressement, which alarmed me and strengthened the suspicions already entertained. His countenance was pale even to ghastliness, and his deep-set eyes glared with unnatural lustre. After some inquiries respecting his health, I asked him, not knowing what better to say, if he had yet obtained ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... the barest distinguishable interval, and the black horizon belches red. From extreme left to extreme right the flattened proscenium in front of us glows with the ghastliness ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... little New England village. Although with the uncompromising practicality of their natures the people had given it a name so directly significant as to make it lose all poetical glamour, and render it the very commonplace of ghastliness, it ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... several barricades, and dispersed tumultuous gatherings. The agitation was hourly on the increase. Random shots were heard in different parts of the city. The dead body of the man shot while defending the barricade was paraded in blood-stained ghastliness through the streets, exciting frenzied passions. The troops of the line, so called, who were known to be in sympathy with the people, and whom General Marmont distrusted, were received with shouts of ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... was still in the sky, though it only appeared at long intervals. Strangely enough, at the moment when I addressed him, a flash came, and seemed to pass right over his face. It gave such a hideously livid hue, such a spectral look of ghastliness and distortion to his features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that my eyes must have been only dazzled ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the mockery, the conventional absurdities, and the affectations which so readily lend themselves to caricature in the name of mourning, no condemnation can be too strong. There is a ghoul-like ghastliness in talking about "ornamental," or "becoming," or "complimentary" mourning. People of sense, of course, manage to dress without going to extremities in either direction. We see many a pale-faced mourner whose quiet mourning-dress tells the story of bereavement ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the ghastliness of each detail; howls resounded through the vault; somebody whom one could not see, whose vicinity was not even suspected, would suddenly drop upon another's shoulder. But what affected me most of all was the cold and the want ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... one said, at her elbow, and with a start she turned to see Blair. As they looked at each other, these two unhappy beings, each felt a faint pity for the other. Blair's face was haggard; Elizabeth's was white to the point of ghastliness, but there was a smudge of crimson just below the glittering amber of her eyes. "Elizabeth!" he said, shocked, "what is it? You are ill! ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... all the episodes of this action were recorded they would make a long as well as a grim narrative revealing the ghastliness, the wild passion, the self-sacrifice, and the cool cunning of such an hour or two of ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... that battered and tore through the still air. At top speed the helmsman drove for the shelter of a hidden cove. They made it an instant before the great waves struck high upon the sand spit. Over the bay hung a ballooning cloud of black and gray—lifting for an instant to show in stark ghastliness the wreckage, broken and twisted, that marked where the battleship Maryland rested in the mud in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... said Knight, there being a faint ghastliness discernible in his laugh. 'They are much worse in a lady's eye than being thought ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred. Here and there the miserable survivors—survivors only for the present—were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent over to examine. To my last day I shall remember, with unfading horror, the aspect of those remnants of mortality, in all the hideousness stamped upon them by the unnamable atrocities practised during that diabolical orgy of murder and mutilation, ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... that it was to be so, the dozen visitors would suffice for him. The young man of thirty travels over all the world, but the old man of seventy is contented with the comparative confinement of his own town, or perhaps of his own house. As to the ghastliness of things to be seen, they could no doubt be removed out of sight; but even that would be cured by custom. The business and pleasures of life at the prescribed time were in general but a pretence at business and a reminiscence of pleasure. The man would know that the fated day was ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... very small indeed on hers. They wrote to her guardians of course to acquaint them with the shocking fact of her flight, but dwelt far more upon the badness of her behavior to them from the first, the rapidity with which she had deteriorated, and the ghastliness of their convictions as to the depth of the degradation she had preferred to the shelter ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... prayers; the looking on mortal as if its resources were infinite; the fearful looking to the immortal as if it were so far off, so implacable, that the dying appeal would be in vain; the open lips, through which one could almost look at the quaking heart below; the ghastliness of brow and tangled hair; the closing pangs; the awful quietus. I thought of Parrhasius, in the poem, as I looked ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... O Jefferson! those moments have occasion'd Many and various rumours of your fortune; Wherefore, permit me to rejoice to see you But whence this sudden ghastliness of visage The ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition; for, like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his own simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death. He shuddered, and looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive influence alone had enticed him ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... way as Tennyson's lines, though containing less of poetic heroism and more ugly realism. Like the trained reporter that he was, Guys followed a battle, recording the salient incidents of the engagement, not overemphasising the ghastliness of the carnage, as did Callot or Goya or Raffet, but telling the truth as he saw it, with a phlegm more British and German than French. Though he had no Dutch blood in his veins, he was, like Huysmans, more the man ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... seed — peas, beans, and divers succulent vegetables. The following morning Hannibal rose late, having overslept himself, as he alleged. I was awakened by his sudden appearance at my bed-side, but no sooner sat up than I fell back again, appalled by the ghastliness ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of the two men were now distinctly visible to each other, and the contrast between them was rather startling. Sir Allan's was placid, courteous, and inquiring. Mr. Brown's was white almost to ghastliness, and his eyes were burning with ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sagging with a hideous load—a row of human skeletons, stark, fleshless, frightful in their ghastliness. All were headless. All, suspended by the cervical vertebrae, swayed lightly as the blue-green light glared on them with its weird, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... to be allowed to know for certain; though, if our prayer were granted, and Mystery no longer hovered, made blue the hills, and turned day into night, we should, as surely, wail at once to be delivered of that ghastliness of knowing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this man's name had been of late a subject of the most violent irritation to the unfortunate patient. The sound of his voice now produced an instantaneous effect. Mr. Bertram started up without assistance, and turned round towards him; the ghastliness of his features forming a strange contrast with the violence of his exclamations.—"Out of my sight, ye viper!—ye frozen viper, that I warmed till ye stung me!—Art thou not afraid that the walls of my father's dwelling should fall and crush thee limb and bone?—Are ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... end of the New-Cut stands the Marsh-gate, which, at night, is all gas and ghastliness, dirt and dazzle, blackguardism and brilliancy. The illumination of the adjacent gin-palace throws a glare on the haggard faces of those who are sauntering outside. Having arrived thus far, watch your opportunity, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... indescribable and most involved expression on his visage, until that young man roused himself and looked towards him; when he turned away, as being suddenly intent upon certain preparations for the journey, and, without giving vent to any articulate sound, smiled with surpassing ghastliness, and seemed by a twist of his features and a motion of his lips, to release himself of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and stretched myself with an ache of luxurious languor. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... grinned affirmation, although the chief of detectives could not fail to note the ghastliness ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... scenes of ghastliness and distress, the court made merry. Joined by fair women and gallant men, their majesties played at bowls and tennis in the grassy meads of the college grounds; rode abroad in great hawking parties; sailed through summer days upon the smooth waters of the river Isis; and by night held revelry ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... decided that she was innocent. Upon them, at least, would not fall the ignominy of having been led into the simplest of traps by this white-faced Delilah. The butler had brought her another glass, which she raised to her lips. She drained its contents, but the ghastliness of her appearance remained unchanged. Peter, watching her, knew the signs. She was sick ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Bostic's in San Jose, I left H. Hanchett in charge of my business, and in four days I stood beside the bedside of my friend, endeared through the trials when death by thirst, starvation and the desert sands, stared us in the face with all its ghastliness. ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... entrance, but there was less ghastliness about her, and as Albinia sat down she did not remove her hand, and turned slightly round, so as to lose that strange corpse-like ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scaring necessity was, that he must stoop and kneel right over the water-but, in order to send his legs in advance down the wall to the top of the mound. It was a moment of agony. That very moment, with an appalling unearthly cry, something dark, something hideous, something of inconceivable ghastliness, as it seemed to Tommy, sprang right out of the water into the air. He tumbled from the wall among the iron, and ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the ends even. "I can imagine nothing more finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat with nail scissors, especially ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... white mass in my arms? what do I hold? is it the corpse by my side, as it lay that long, long night? It is—it is. Cold, stiff, stirless as then. White—horribly white—as when the moon, that would not set, showed all its ghastliness. Ah! it moves, embraces me, stifles, suffocates me. Help! remove the pillow. I cannot breathe—I choke—oh!' And now I am coming to the strangest part of my story—and, strange as it may sound, every word is as ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... he should have three days unmolested; but perhaps the circumstances would have justified Hilary to any business man, and it could really matter nothing to the defaulter dead or alive. In either case he was out of harm's way. Matt, all the same, felt the ghastliness of being there on the same errand with these agents of his father, and reaching the same facts with them. At moments it seemed to him as if he were tacitly working in agreement with them, for the same purpose as well as to the same end; but he would not let this illusion ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... reflections passed like the stings of scorpions through Waverley's sensorium, the worthy divine was startled in a long disquisition on the battle of Falkirk by the ghastliness which they communicated to his looks, and asked him if he was ill. Fortunately the bride, all smirk and blush, had just entered the room. Mrs. Williams was none of the brightest of women, but she was good-natured, and readily concluding that Edward had been shocked ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Ypres had been an innovation. It was not a discovery; merely an application of ghastliness which had been considered too horrible for use. As a surprise it had been successful—once. The defense answered with gas masks, which made it still more important that soldiers should not be absent-minded and leave ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... corner of his lips. I casually repeated the manoeuvre, and he just as casually repeated his. Then I glanced at the window—the door I knew was hopeless,—and it was iron barred. I gazed again at the man, and his eyes grinned evilly as they met mine. Without a doubt he meant to murder me. The ghastliness of my position stunned me. Even if I shrieked for help, who would hear me save desperadoes, in all probability every whit as ready as my companion to ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... bed, and glanced at Arithelli's throat, now almost covered with white patches of membrane. There was no time to waste if she was to be saved from the ghastliness ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... priests; the half-naked executioners; the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of the blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads—is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty 'new drop,' and dog-like agony of infliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence. Two of these men behaved calmly enough, but the first of the three died ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ground in the strongest relief, and with wonderful truth of coloring. The expression was that of agony—the agony of intense bodily pain; but a menace scowled upon the brow, and a few sprinklings of blood added to its ghastliness. Yet it was not all these characteristics—it was some horror of the mind, some inscrutable antipathy awakened by this picture, which ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... warlike peace which only a battling and victorious life can give, but it had for the time the half-hunted look of one who trembles at the sound of footsteps he had hoped were forever still, of one whose soul was overstormed by surging waves of memory. There is sometimes a dread ghastliness in the thought that out of the abundance of a man's heart his mouth is speaking, though he declares it not. It is like the procession of a naked soul; or, to change the figure, it is like beholding a man unearth some very corpse he had long ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... personal prayers of the whole assembly. These meetings were the substitutes for all other social diversions or emotions. There was a revival preacher by the name of Knapp, whose lurid eloquence in this vein made him famous, and whose imagery was equal in ghastliness to anything that the Catholic Church could produce. I remember one of his most dramatic bits, borrowed from a much earlier preacher, a passage in his description of hell. In hell, he said, there was a clock, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... wind. The look which she cast upon me, as she shot by, haunted me for years after, whenever an image of terror rose in my dreams. Her eyes were starting from their sockets, her lips gasping wide, her visage ghastliness itself. Another moment, and all must be over; for at the end of the valley was the cliff, a hundred and fifty feet high. I rushed after her. The sight of the sea had struck her at once. She uttered a scream, and fell with her forehead ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... In his agitation, he stepped forward into the lighter part of the room, and I could see that his face was pale to ghastliness—except his nose and the adjacent red patches on his cheeks, which stood out in grotesquely hideous contrast. Presently, however, he recovered ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... nothing had been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance, and transformed him into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of any thing completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses us as an unreality, and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures excel all I have seen in Paris and England. The figure of the dead man who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas, of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain and cursing. A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to me of this picture: C'est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois. Another, who showed me relics in one of their ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... something in his hand, he might now have been a murderer: How awful! Only one had spoken; but he could have killed them both! And the word was true, and was in all mouths—all low common mouths, day after day, of his own daughter's child! The ghastliness of this thought, brought home so utterly, made him writhe, and grasp the railings as if ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... certainly not two who might not have gone straight to the North Pole itself, completely furnished for the winter! It has been the talk of all London for these three weeks. And now it is a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams, canvases, paint-pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas-pipes, and ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks in all my leisure hours, that I feel now shipwrecked—as if I had never been without a play on my hands before. A third topic comes ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... we were journeying through the wilderness of ruin, in the midst of untold and eternal tortures, from cell to cell, from dungeon to dungeon, the last alway surpassing in monstrous ghastliness, until finally we came within view of an enormous entrance hall, most unsightly of all that I had previously seen. It was very spacious and terribly steep, running in the direction of a gloomy red corner, full ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... becoming, and softened her worst points; the hangings of her bed and the richly embroidered crimson silk coverlet were part of the coquetry of her costume, from which habit had taken all sense of ghastliness; she was proud of them, and she was not aware of the scent of drugs that insisted through the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... parted the little ringlets that curled over her brow, and told her she would soon have a better home in a better world. Then he turned to poor English, and the cross, and the candles, and the pictures, and the living faces that gave such a ghastliness to the picture. Mrs. McCarty brought him a basin of water, over which he muttered, and made it holy. Then he again muttered some unintelligible sentences, and sprinkled the water over the dying child, over the body of poor English, and over the living-warning Mrs. McCarty and her daughters, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... tomb of the cacique. The territory embraced in our own country was not without examples of this horrid custom. On the lower Mississippi, the Natchez Indians brought it with them from Central America in all its ghastliness. When a sun or chief died, one or several of his wives and his highest officers were knocked on the head and buried with him, and at such times the barbarous privilege was allowed to any of the lowest caste to at once gain admittance to the highest ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... with no mouth and jaw fell to helping again! The wheels struck a rise in the ground, and he waved his hands in impotent excitement, and then rushed at Jimmie, exposing to the horrified little machinist the full ghastliness of that red ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... for the moment, even more at the demoniacal ferocity displayed by the combatants than at the weird ghastliness of the manner in which the fight had ended, I signed to Piet, and, wheeling our horses, we galloped away from the scene of the tragedy, nor drew rein again until we reached the wagon, which was in the act of being outspanned. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... sympathy, and caused him to request that he should be brought to his office. Accordingly he was introduced. The prize-money had not yet been paid, and he was in the costume in which he had answered the advertisement of his good fortune. Thin, and pale even to ghastliness, his whole appearance indicated sickness and the utmost destitution. A well-worn frock-coat concealed the absence of a shirt, and imperfect boots disclosed the want of hose. But the eyes of the young man ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... according to the enlightenment of her kind, she plied her pencil and puffs; and when, at last, she stood before the mirror, new gowned, beautiful after the conventions of her kind, blind to the ghastliness of it, ignorant of the secret of her strength, she had a triumphant consciousness ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... transform itself, as one watches it, and nothing else, into enormous cliffs, long slopes of moor, and spurs of mountain-range. Oh, those smooth white walls and ceilings! If there had but been a print—a stain of dirt—a cobweb, to fleck their unbroken ghastliness! They stared at me, like grim, impassive, featureless formless fiends; all the more dreadful for their sleek, hypocritic cleanliness—purity as of a saint-inquisitor watching with spotless conscience the victim on the rack. They ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... than usually offensive brand of imitation coffee. Mr. McCall was inclined to think that he loathed the imitation coffee rather more than the cereal, but Washington held strong views on the latter's superior ghastliness. Both Washington and his father, however, would have been fair-minded enough to admit that ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... into a heavy slumber, and did not wake till dawn. At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness of a right mind. She knew the worst of him—the very worst. How could he face her now? She would soon be coming down to see about breakfast, as she had said, and there would he be in all his shame confronting her. He could not bear the thought, and softly drawing on his ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... than expose such opprobrious tokens to the observation and censure of the magistrate, submitted to the expedient. Although his counsellor had overrated his own skill, he was persuaded to confide in the disguise, and actually attended the proctor, with such a staring addition to the natural ghastliness of his features, that his visage bore a very apt resemblance to some of those ferocious countenances that hang over the doors of certain taverns and ale-houses, under the denomination ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... endeavored to thrust him by, within half a dozen lengths of the winning post, the incarnate nightmare turned squarely about and fixed upon him a portentous stare—delivering at the same time a grimace of such prodigious ghastliness that the poor thoroughbred, with an almost human scream of terror, wheeled about, and tore away to the rear with the speed of the wind, leaving the colonel an easy winner in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... (rather ludicrous again): "voiced a sad and simple tale" (abominable!): "unprovender'd:" "such his tale:" "Ah! suffering to the height of what was suffer'd" (a most insufferable line): "amazements of affright:" "the hot sore brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture" (what shocking confusion of ideas!). In these delineations of common & natural feelings, in the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Roubigne's tenants, "much of his native loftiness remained in the execution." ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... there! broken-legged table. You have gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight. Shine softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was unfurled. Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... darkness, and says to us, in the spirit of a part of this parable, 'You have Moses and the prophets—hear them: if these are not enough, it will not be enough for you if all the glories of heaven and all the ghastliness of hell are flashed and flamed before you.' We, too, if we are to 'prophesy according to the proportion of faith,' must not leave out altogether references to a future life in its two departments, and such motives as may be based upon them; only, I think, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the smell of ether, and managed to hold herself quite firm against it. But there was a ghastliness in the whole thing which ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... played on his face, half hiding, half revealing the ghastliness of it; and we, without speech or movement, stood watching him, till the candle sputtering out left us in darkness. Pillot would have fetched another from the inn, but he feared to stir lest the sound should disturb the dying man. How long we remained thus I cannot tell, but shortly ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... vaults of pain, Enribbed and wrought with groins of ghastliness, I passed, and garish spectres moved my ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... the glass away, but Dellwig insisted. Klutz was pale to ghastliness, and his eyes were brimming ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... breath in a half-sob, then tightened her lips as she rose. His face was white to ghastliness, so shaken was he by the struggle through which he had passed. They did not look at each other, but walked directly to the horses. She leaned against Dolly's neck while he tightened the girths. Then she ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... body of some poor victim is taken from the debris, and the town, or rather the remnants of it, is one vast charnel house. The scenes at the extemporized morgue are beyond powers of description in their ghastliness, while the moans and groans of the suffering survivors, tossing in agony, with bruised and mangled bodies, or screaming in a delirium of fever as they issue from the numerous temporary hospitals, make even the stoutest hearted quail with terror. Nearly two thousand ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... his own sally, but Hans's face was frozen into a sullen ghastliness that nothing less than the trump of doom could have broken. Also, Hans was feeling very sick. He had not realized the enormousness of the task of putting a fellow-man out of the world. Edith, on the other hand, had realized; but the realization did not make the task any easier. She was filled ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... early as she could see the way. She must have stayed with us over night, for I went to sleep in her arms, and they were still around me when I awoke; and it seemed like a new day, for we had time for many cherished talks. She veiled from us the ghastliness of death, telling us Aunt Betsy and both our little cousins had gone to heaven. She said Lewis had been first to go, and his mother had soon followed; that she herself had carried little Sammie from his sick mother's tent to ours the very day we three were taken away; and ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... chaotic. In thought we can see only the bright, but in hard fact we are brought face to face with the dark side. Waste, ruin, conflict, rot, are about us everywhere. . . . We need as little think this earth all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness; of harmony and chaos; of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. . . . The poets indeed are the true authors of the beauty and order of nature; ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard's lank neck. Not unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... or partly the corpse or skeleton within are perhaps not intended to convey any such pious or poetic thought as do the two foregoing, but simply to pourtray the ghastliness of death, a kind of imagery much fancied by ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... and feel what was not? What was this, but the action of diseased imaginations and childish credulity? So might it be; but what was most real, was the existence of these very fears; the staring looks of horror, the faces pale even to ghastliness, the voices struck dumb with harrowing dread, of those among us who saw and heard these things. Of this number was Adrian, who knew the delusion, yet could not cast off the clinging terror. Even ignorant infancy appeared with timorous shrieks and convulsions to acknowledge the presence of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... my head over the manes of Schultz, and went on with my friend's letter. It told me how the brig on the reef, looted by the natives from the coast villages, acquired gradually the lamentable aspect, the grey ghastliness of a wreck; while Jasper, fading daily into a mere shadow of a man, strode brusquely all along the "front" with horribly lively eyes and a faint, fixed smile on his lips, to spend the day on a lonely spit ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... misfortune or sin of a man's life as clearly before his face as on the day he was first mortified or degraded by it—before his face, not in one terrible dream, which is once for all over with sunrise, but as haunting ghosts, made out by the feverish eyes of the soul down to the minutest detail of ghastliness, and never leaving the side of the rack on which he lies for a moment of dark or day-light, till sleep, at the end of a month, first drops out of heaven on ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... that has happened to me (and the leaf I sent you this morning may show you it has had some hurting in it) is little in comparison to the crushing and depressing effect on me, of what I learn day by day as I work on, of the cruelty and ghastliness of the nature I used to think so Divine? But, I get out of it by remembering, This is but a crumb of dust we call the "world," and a moment of eternity which we call "time." Can't answer the great ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... same day blazed down upon a picture which for ghastliness surpassed even the horrors painted by the madman Werth, which, if your mind is steeped in morbidness, you can see for a franc, or for nothing, I really forget which, when next ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest |
