"Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happy excitement was something not easily to be forgotten. He sprang from his chair, reached out his powerful hands, caught the girl about the waist, and picked her up in his arms as he might have picked up a child. His great bear-like hug was a monstrous thing to endure, but Helen was more than willing to endure it, as also his kisses, which he rained ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... moment I had no idea what my supposed crime was, and the officer's question filled me with horror. Conde dead! and I charged with murder! It seemed monstrous, impossible. But the officer was speaking, and I ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... Speeches and Actions, which in their own Nature are indifferent, appear ridiculous when they proceed from a wrong Sex, the Faults and Imperfections of one Sex transplanted into another, appear black and monstrous. As for the Men, I shall not in this Paper any further concern my self about them: but as I would fain contribute to make Womankind, which is the most beautiful Part of the Creation, entirely amiable, and wear out all those little Spots and Blemishes that are apt to rise among the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... neglected, just because it does not appear so pressing. With the mud at the bottom of society we can practically do nothing; only the vast changes to be wrought by time will cleanse that foulness, by destroying the monstrous wrong which produces it. What I should like to attempt would be the spiritual education of the upper artisan and mechanic class. At present they are all but wholly in the hands of men who can do them nothing but harm—journalists, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... are, in the first place, very expensive. The materials are costly, and the preparations still more so. What a monstrous thing, that, in order to satisfy the appetite of a man, there must be a person or two at work every day! More fuel, culinary implements, kitchen-room; what! all these merely to tickle the palate of four or five people, and especially people who can hardly pay their way! ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... impeded circulation, under the effect of the east wind upon your cuticle. How I wish, without the bitter month's sea-sickness, you could be here beside me now, this 24th of March, between an open window and door, and with my fire dying out; to be sure, as I have just been taking two monstrous unruly dogs to a pond at some distance from the house, for a swim, and as S—— was with me and I had to carry her (now a pretty heavy lump) through several mud passages, the agreeable glow in which I feel myself may not be altogether due to the warmth of the atmosphere, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... know of me, as of the men and their maners and customes, of the beasts, and of the countries adioyning, I haue made therof a particuler booke, which by Gods help I will bring with me: wherein I haue decribed the countrey, the monstrous fishes, the customes and lawes of Frisland, Island, Estland, the kingdome of Norway, Estotiland, Drogio, and in the end the life of M. Nicolo, the knight our brother, with the discouery which he made, and the state of Groneland. I haue also written ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... it. What I mean is, that it was all fair game. He ran his chance, and did it in a manly fashion." The Earl did not quite understand Sir William, who seemed to take almost a favourable view of these monstrous betrothals. "What I mean is, that nobody can touch him, or find fault with him. He has not carried her away, and got up a marriage before she was of age. He hasn't kept her from going out among her friends. He hasn't—wronged her, ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... their celebrations and 101 gun salutes, this was as far as they could go; the monstrous growth which had clogged our defense now sealed the invaders off and held them in an evershrinking sector. Now came another period of quiescence in the war, but a period radically different in temper from the first. There were many, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and is required by man, though Nature may spurn and over-ride it. The earthquake, the hurricane, and the angry ocean are not in the golden mean, not at least from a human point of view. If man chooses to personify and body forth the powers of nature, he creates some monstrous uncouth figure, like the Assyrian and Egyptian idols; but if man makes a study of man, and brings genius and patient elaboration to bear on his work, there emerges the symmetry and perfect proportion of the Greek statue. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... man, whoe'er thou art, within whose breast The glowing thoughts disdain ignoble rest; Whose soul is laboring with a monstrous birth Of winged words, to scatter through the earth Of thee I ask, What hast thou done of that thou hast to do? Art silent? Then I say, Until thy deeds are many let thy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... be that, now? Look, cap'n, look overside, do 'e, and tell me, if you can, what monstrous thing we've a-run foul of now." And as he ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... married, he should assume the responsibilities of married life; and if he had honest reason for not recognizing the marriage, he should stop the woman from pursuing him. If the case kept Carnac out of public life and himself in, then justice would be done; for it was monstrous that a veteran should be driven into obscurity by a boy. In making his announcement he would be fighting his son as though he was a stranger and not of his own blood and bones. He had no personal connection with Carnac in the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this metal being rubbed bright happened to catch a ray of the sun at such an angle that it was reflected in my eye. This flash, which was like lightning in its intensity, together with the roar of the falling case, transported me—it's monstrous what jumps we take when the fit is on us—to the slopes of dim mountains in the night, to the heights above Valhalla with the flash of Valkyrs descending. And the booming of the case upon the slide—God pity me—was the music. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... fellows must have the seven league boots, the way you get over ground. And just after I've gone and made away with a monstrous supper, too," he managed to say, between gasps. "Let me get my breath, and I've got ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... Nowhere was any order or system—everything was struggling for itself, and jarring and clashing with everything else; and this broke the spell of power which the Titan city would otherwise have produced. It seemed like a monstrous heap of wasted energies; a mountain in perpetual labour, and producing an endless series of abortions. The men and women in it were wearing themselves out with toil; but there was a spell laid upon them, so that, struggle as they might, they ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... and overthrew him. He had helped to unite them by introducing a conflict of ideas at a time when, apparently, and on the surface, there was none. Everybody was a Republican and a Jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture of associating divine sanction with the crimes of his sanguinary reign. The scheme was not suggested by expediency, for he had been always true to the idea. In early life he had met Rousseau at Ermenonville, and he had adopted the indeterminate religion of the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... steps off, a monstrous sea-spider, about thirty-eight inches high, was watching me with squinting eyes, ready to spring upon me. Though my diver's dress was thick enough to defend me from the bite of this animal, I could not help shuddering with ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... was near at hand. He stared ahead, and believed he could even make out spectral objects moving this way and that, like monstrous, though dimly seen, dragonflies, such as all country boys have watched many a time while on a warm summer day, lying at rest on the bank ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... at the daring blasphemy to which his monstrous passion had driven him. Many females, who were in tears, lamenting audibly, started, and felt their grief suspended for a moment by this revolting charge against the ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... at that moment of all moments!... Really, it was past belief! How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive! Actually, to look on, as it were, at the triumph of a Rival.... Good God! It was monstrous! tact—reticence—he had never credited her with an overwhelming amount of either: but he had never attributed mere—oh, there was no word for it! Monstrous—monstrous! Did she intend thenceforward.... Good ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... of offspring depend their lives or deaths and their moral welfare or ruin, yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given, to those who will hereafter be parents? Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, or impulse, or fancy, joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and the ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... it, gentlemen," Fergus replied heartily. "I have had luck, and availed myself of it, as assuredly you would have done had the same opportunities occurred to you. I can quite understand that it seemed to you monstrous that, at my age, I should be your senior officer. I feel it myself. I am often inclined to regret that I should thus have been unduly ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... by M. Gannal. How dare you report the monstrous calumnies regarding the best of men? Take down the family Bible, and read what my blessed saint says of his wives,—read it, written in ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... the next. To add to our difficulties darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... at all sure that this was a proper place to get waylaid, but something monstrous fine would of course happen before long; there could be no doubt about that. How people would be astonished when they came along and found that he had grown to be four ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... Monstrous assertion! or so it seemed to Ransom as the whirl of his thoughts settled and reason resumed its sway. Only one! But he had himself seen two; so had Mrs. Deo and the maids; he could even relate the differences between them on that first night. Yet had he ever ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... shelf to shelf, where the rock had been blasted away so as to form a flight of the roughest of rough steps of monstrous size, while, trembling in every ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... eyes received them, as men escaped from death. They plied their oars, and set their sails, and when they were got as far off from shore as a voice could reach, Ulysses cried out to the Cyclop: "Cyclop, thou shouldst not have so much abused thy monstrous strength, as to devour thy guests. Jove by my hand sends thee requital to pay thy savage inhumanity." The Cyclop heard, and came forth enraged, and in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock, and threw it with blind ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... that Mr. Godfrey indignantly refused to listen to these monstrous terms. Mr. Luker thereupon, handed him back the Diamond, and wished him ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... shrine and there leaped from the darkness a monstrous gray Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... not, by their determined and persistent persecutions and insults, drive him in a fit of desperation to do this in the hope of pulling down ruin on the heads of all? This seems probable to me, and to me is far more monstrous than if they had, in sudden anger, cut his ears, or even cut his throat; and if these young bloods could so treat a stranger there, standing at such a manifest disadvantage, what would they not be capable ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... wide-open for their entrance. It might be that the roughest and darkest side of the matter was not shown me, there being persons of eminent station and of both sexes in the party which I accompanied; and, of course, a properly trained public functionary would have deemed it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to exhibit anything to people of rank that might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... green-gray mob was near enough. Then the word came. Sapristi! We let loose with mitrailleuse, rifle, field-gun, everything that would throw death. It did not seem like fighting with men. It was like trying to stop a monstrous thing, a huge, terrible mass that was rushing on to overwhelm us. The waves tumbled and broke before they reached us. Sometimes they fell flat. Sometimes they turned and rushed the other way. It was wild, wild, like a change of the wind and tide in a storm, everything torn and confused. ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... vampyrism is true in the popular sense, and that these fresh-looking and well-conditioned corpses had some mysterious way of preternaturally nourishing themselves? That would be to adopt, not to solve the superstition. Let us content ourselves for the present with a notion less monstrous, but still startling enough: That the bodies, which were found in the so-called vampyr state, instead of being in a new and mystical condition, were simply alive in the common way; that, in short, they were the bodies of persons who had been buried alive; and whose ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... undergo radical changes of nature. They become savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty that they would never dream of committing in their original temperate climate. They become nervous, irritable, and less moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... class on the Lord's day'! The idea of making a man truly moral through the ministry of constables, and sincerely religious under the influence of penalties, is worthy of the mind which could form such a mass of monstrous absurdity as this bill is ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... said the man with the withered arm, pushing the beer toward him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a shaking hand, that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall, and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarcely expected these grotesque custodians. There is, to my mind, something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells
... a monstrous lie!" exclaimed Fanfaro, beside himself with rage, while Irene de Salves rose upright ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the Irish members at Westminster is on the face of it a gross and patent injustice to Great Britain. It is absurd, it is monstrous, that while the Irish Parliament and the Irish Parliament alone settle whether Mr. Healy, Mr. M'Carthy, Mr. Redmond, or Mr. Davitt is to be head of the Irish government, and England, though vitally interested in the character of the Irish Executive, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... East—Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Parthia, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Bactria, and other countries—the one hundred and twenty provinces of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, from the Mediterranean to India, from the Euxine and Caspian Seas to Arabia and the Persian Gulf—a monstrous empire, whose possession was calculated to inflame the monarchs who reigned at Susa and Babylon with more than mortal pride and self-sufficiency. It had been gradually won by successive conquerors, from Nimrod to Darius. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... difficult—" And therewith the fellow proceeded with great gusto to tell the story of cruelty the like of which, it is to be hoped, for the credit of one's manhood, is not often repeated. And while it was telling, Jack "sat tight" and listened, storing up every vile word and every monstrous detail in his mind that he might have something to whet his vengeance upon when the time for vengeance should come. But his agitation was so evident, his distress so poignant, that Alvaros thought it would be very good fun to direct public attention to it; so, feigning to become suddenly aware ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... de potro, or colt's-foot boots, manufactured from the hide of a colt's fore-leg, which he strips off whole, chafes in his hand until it becomes pliable and soft, sews up at the lower extremity,—and puts on, the best riding-boot that the habitable world can show. Add a monstrous spur to each heel of this chaussure, and you will have fully equipped the worthy Juan de Dios for active service.—But stay! his accoutrements! We must not forget that Birmingham-made butcher-knife, which, for a dozen years, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... God's name could he do? Could he denounce Wardour to Captain Helding on bare suspicion—without so much as the shadow of a proof to justify what he said? The captain would decline to insult one of his officers by even mentioning the monstrous accusation to him. The captain would conclude, as others had already concluded, that Crayford's mind was giving way under stress of cold and privation. No hope—literally, no hope now, but in the numbers of the expedition. Officers and men, they all liked ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... at his knees That formidable, hard, voluminous History of growth from acorn into age. They titter like school-children; they arouse Their comrades, who exclaim: 'He is very sage.' Look how the moon is staring through that cloud, Laying and lifting idle streaks of light. O hark! was that the monstrous wind, so loud And sudden, prowling always through the night? Let down the shaking curtain. They are queer, Those foreigners. They and we live ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... expressed herself logically and lucidly on the economic problems of the day—that, for the sake of the few cents they could earn, she should put the children, whom he knew she loved, into slavery, seemed to him monstrous beyond belief. Why, if this were true, what a hypocrite the girl was! As coarse and unfeeling as the rest of them. Yet she had some shame left; she had blushed to be caught in the act by him. It showed her worse than those who justified this ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy's hand. Either in ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... Palaeozoic times? The supposition that the Dinosaurian, Crocodilian, Dicynodontian, and to Plesiosaurian types were suddenly created at the end of the Permian epoch may be dismissed, without further consideration, as a monstrous and unwarranted assumption. The supposition that all these types were rapidly differentiated out of Lacertilia in the time represented by the passage from the Palaeozoic to the Mesozoic formation, appears to me to be hardly more credible, to say nothing of the indications ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... abandoned the freedom of the seas ... on which he had taken a determined stand before the world. Although he refused the Rhine frontier to France, he had reluctantly given way to M. Clemenceau in the matter of the Saar Valley, assenting to a monstrous arrangement by which the German inhabitants of that region were to be handed over to the French Republic against their expressed will, as a set-off for a sum in gold which Germany would certainly be unable ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the majority. There is no instance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as that which the protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholicks. Did we tell them we have conquered them, it would be above board: to punish them by confiscation and other penalties, as rebels, was monstrous injustice. King William was not their lawful sovereign: he had not been acknowledged by the Parliament of Ireland, when they appeared ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... extending to the highest places of the nobility and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the conservative or reactionary party, strong in the vis inertiae, and in the king's pig-headed prejudices and his monstrous conceit of theological ability and supremacy in the church; strong also in a considerable adhesion and zealous cooeperation from among his nominees, the bishops. The religious division was also a political one, the Puritans ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... ask pardon, and for a long time I have earnestly wished that I might find opportunity to do so. My conduct has been simply monstrous, but of late it has seemed worse than the reality. Everything has been against me. If you only knew—but—" (and her head bowed lower). Then she added, hastily, "My maid has been false, and I must have appeared more ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. We see this even in so trifling a fact as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak tree. With all organic beings, excepting perhaps some of the very lowest, sexual reproduction seems to be essentially similar. With all, as far as is at present known, the germinal ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... immediately went in search of him; having found his track they followed him by the blood for a mile, found him concealed in some thick brushwood, and shot him with two balls through the skull. Though somewhat smaller than that killed a few days ago, he was a monstrous animal, and a most terrible enemy. Our man had shot him through the centre of the lungs; yet he had pursued him furiously for half a mile, then returned more than twice that distance, and with his talons prepared himself a bed in the earth two feet deep and five feet long; ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... of Da Derga's Hostel" is a specimen of remarkable beauty and power. The primitive nature of the story is shown by the fact that the plot turns upon the disasters that follow on the violation of tabus or prohibitions often with a supernatural sanction, by the monstrous nature of many of the warriors, and by the utter absence of any attempt to rationalise or explain the beliefs implied or the marvels related in it. The powers and achievements of the heroes are fantastic and extraordinary beyond description, and the natural and extra-natural ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... success. Either direct sale or horse-trade proved useless. Charley liked Denver too well to put up with less interesting owners so Charley always came back, and nearly always accompanied by profanity and threats. Charley was spectacular, and a monstrous care but Denver ended by becoming fond of the nuisance. He would miss the radiant, stupid ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... what seemed but a few minutes, to find the room dark, for the moon must just have set. I was very sleepy, and I wondered vaguely why I had awakened; and then suddenly, without warning, and without cause, a monstrous, unreasonable fear seized me. An indefinable intuition told me that I was not alone—that some horrible presence was near. I do not think the certainty of immediate death could have inspired me with a greater dread than that which suddenly came upon me. I ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... were right all along—I felt him, I felt what he was thinking! And mommy cried please, Ben, take me away, let's leave them and never come back, never, and daddy said it's horrible, he told that dog to kill me and it went right for my throat, the boy is evil and monstrous. Even from downstairs I could feel daddy's fear pounding into my head and then I heard the door banging and looked out the window and saw daddy carrying suitcases out through the snow to the car and then mommy came ...
— My Friend Bobby • Alan Edward Nourse
... had embarked on the leaping, boiling, muddy Athabaska, in this frail canoe, it had seemed a foolhardy enterprise. How could such a craft ride such a stream for 2,000 miles? It was like a mouse mounting a monstrous, untamed, plunging and rearing horse. Now we set out each morning, familiar with stream and our boat, having no thought of danger, and viewing the water, the same turbid flood, as, our servant. Even ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... time during the voyage the half-caste missed striking his fish. Unable to sustain himself steadily, owing to his injured foot and the rough sea, he darted his iron a second or two too late. It fell flat on the back of the monstrous creature, which at once sounded in alarm, and next reappeared a mile to windward. For an hour Frewen kept up the chase, and then the ship signalled for all the boats to return, for the wind and sea were increasing, and it was useless for them to attempt ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... no plan in mind beyond an overwhelming desire to put a bad fright into his roommate in payment for what he considered a monstrous act of duplicity. It would serve Travail right if, once he entered the secondary plane of the shell, he would be forced to stay there a while. A good scare would cause him to ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... the awful story has been submitted declare that there are in the world many unknown madmen; as adroit and as terrible as this monstrous lunatic. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... husbands, involving the same strict accountability for affectional aberrations. And for this there is a very good reason, which is no less valid now than it was in the hoariest antiquity. A husband's infidelity, though morally as reprehensible as that of the wife, does not entail quite such monstrous consequences. For if she deceives him, he may ignorantly bring up another man's children, toil for them, bestow his name and affection upon them, and leave them his property. One can scarcely conceive of a more outrageous wrong than this; and it is in order to guard against ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the ninth and tenth books of the Odyssey, Homer has embellished the tales of fearful and credulous sailors, who transformed the cannibals of Italy and Sicily into monstrous giants.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the Duke, "I must tell you that I gladly descend to bandy words with you; your monstrous impudence is a claim to rank I cannot ignore. But a lackey who has himself followed by ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... Augeias' monstrous stable there was wrought With cunning craft on that invincible targe; And Hercules was turning through the same The deep flow of Alpheius' stream divine, While wondering Nymphs looked down on every hand Upon that mighty work. Elsewhere portrayed ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and incredible when one looks back on them; even soap bubbles, you know, have rainbow hues till they burst: and, indeed, the blind avarice of men does but resemble the blind vanity of women: look at our grandmothers' hoops, and our mothers' short waists and monstrous heads! Yet in their day what woman did not glory in these insanities? Well then, Mr. Richard Hardie, at twenty-five, was the one to foresee the end of all these bubbles; he came down from London and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... turning to the crowd of spectators: "Gentlemen," he said, "I am the victim of a most monstrous calumny, and I call on you to treat this scoundrel with his trumped-up ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... may without disrespect, and without confining the remark to the rural districts, term the provincial mind, and wherever they exist the ideas of the Civil-Service Reformers are not only not understood or treated as visionary, but are regarded with aversion and distrust as foreign, monstrous and inconsistent with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... thought we saw one of the boulders, with which the island was liberally besprinkled, on the move. Running up to examine it with all the eagerness of children let out of school, we found it to be one of the inhabitants, a monstrous tortoise. I had some big turtle around the cays of the Gulf of Mexico, but this creature dwarfed them all. We had no means of actually measuring him, and had to keep clear of his formidable-looking jaws, but roughly, and within the mark, he was four feet ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... after a terrible pause). Betrayed! Betrayed! It flashes upon my soul like lightning! A, fiendish trick! A murderer and a robber through fiend-like machinations! Calumniated by him! My letters falsified, suppressed! his heart full of love! Oh, what a monstrous fool was I! His fatherly heart full of love! oh, villainy, villainy! It would have cost me but once kneeling at his feet—a tear would have done it—oh blind, blind fool that I was! (running up against the wall). I might have ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was the extortion practised ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the error of his parents. He was my playmate whenever he was permitted, but even this permission was qualified by some remark, some direction or counsel, from one or other of his parents, which was intended to let him know, and make me feel, that there was a monstrous difference ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... regeneration in mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin therefore by asking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions are which may make one human character ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... much as to watch all that is going on down on your planet, and see what people in general, and children in particular, are doing, every day and all day. You may wonder how I can see so far, and see distinctly, but that is easily explained. I have a great, monstrous mirror, which is—oh! well, if I were to tell you how big it is, you would not believe me, so I will only say that it is very big indeed. This mirror has also the advantage of being a very strong magnifying glass, and as I can tip it in any direction I please, you will easily understand ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... also full of answers to the questions set by the destiny of humankind. This great continent of mysterious Pontiffs, Living Gods, Mahatmas and readers of the terrible book of Karma is awakening and the ocean of hundreds of millions of human lives is lashed with monstrous waves. ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... it can be undermined, or hurt in the least. To believe so would be I conceive to doubt the Providence of God. For it cannot be supposed, that a religion really given by the Almighty and All wise can be undermined by a wretched mortal, a child of dust and infirmity; the supposition is monstrous, and therefore no examination of its claims ought to be deprecated, or frowned at by those who think it "founded on adamant," for no man shrinks at having that examined which he is positively confident of being able ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... went through me at this sudden apparition. What!—a boat—a small boat—passing beneath that arch into yonder roaring gulf! Yes, yes, down through that awful water-way, with more than the swiftness of an arrow, shot the boat, or skiff, right into the jaws of the pool. A monstrous breaker curls over the prow—there is no hope; the boat is swamped, and all drowned in that strangling vortex. No! the boat, which appeared to have the buoyancy of a feather, skipped over the threatening horror, and the next moment was out of danger, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... twilight may well seem intolerable. To Montaigne it was not intolerable. It was his element, his pleasant Arcadia, his natural home. He loved the incongruities and inconsistencies of such a world; its outrageous Rabelaisian jests, its monstrous changes and chances, its huge irrelevancy. He loved its roguish and goblinish refusal to give up its secret to grave and solemn intellects, taking upon themselves the role of prophets. He loved a world that hides ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... fitchew, and such like, which Cardan includeth under the word Mustela: also of the otter, and likewise of the beaver, whose hinder feet and tail only are supposed to be fish. Certes the tail of this beast is like unto a thin whetstone, as the body unto a monstrous rat: as the beast also itself is of such force in the teeth that it will gnaw a hole through a thick plank, or shere through a double billet in a night; it loveth also the stillest rivers, and it is given to them ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... the matter of love, as we are alone, I must confess that they are quite against us. For if any one following nature should lay down the law which existed before the days of Laius, and denounce these lusts as contrary to nature, adducing the animals as a proof that such unions were monstrous, he might prove his point, but he would be wholly at variance with the custom of your states. Further, they are repugnant to a principle which we say that a legislator should always observe; for we are always enquiring ...
— Laws • Plato
... making fun of me," said Katy, who could see this, though the young man was so pleasant and so funny, she could not be offended with him. "I don't believe your mother would like it, if she should hear you tell such a monstrous story." ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... the horrors of war. Everyone knows them to be sudden, hideous, and overwhelming; those who have seen them can speak also of the squalor, the filthiness, the murderous swindling, and the inconceivable absurdity of the whole monstrous performance. But the horrors of peace, if not so obvious, come nearer to our daily life, and we are naturally terrified at its softness, its monotony, and its enfeebling relaxation. Of all people in the world the wealthy classes of England and America are probably the furthest removed ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... at escape. And now he was sparing no pains to bring her back to health, daily sending her messages of good will and good wishes, with flowers from the garden in the courtyard, which, as Ena had reported, he had plucked with his own hand. It was monstrous! ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... ceased; and a hundred voices broke out at once, pouring invectives on the traitorous ambition of Sir William Wallace, and invoking the regent to pass some signal condemnation on so monstrous a crime. In vain Kirkpatrick thundered forth his indignant soul; he was unheard in the tumult; but going up to the countess, he accused her to her face of falsehood, and charged her with a design from some really treasonable motive ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Friars were encouraged to bring in informations against their brethren; the slightest evidence was credited; and even the calumnies spread abroad by the friends of the reformation, were regarded as grounds of proof. Monstrous disorders are therefore said to have been found in many of the religious houses; whole convents of women abandoned to lewdness; signs of abortions procured, of infants murdered, of unnatural lusts between persons of the same sex. It is indeed probable, that the blind submission ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no idea ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... was a big two-story frame affair, built of California lumber, with a galvanized iron roof. So disproportionate was it to the slender ring of the atoll that it showed out upon the sand-strip and above it like some monstrous excrescence. They of the Malahini paid the courtesy visit ashore immediately after anchoring. Other captains and buyers were in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day. Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... terrible. I had not thought—indeed it cannot be. My father would not permit it. The laws of war would apply, I suppose, to your enlisted men, but that you and Surgeon McAllister, who have been our guests and have sat at our table, should be taken from our hospitality into captivity is monstrous. In permitting it, I seem to share in ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... directly across one outstretched arm, and another across his legs. And above him loomed a monstrous, complicated shadow, which, after a moment, slowly melted from his line of vision. Panicky, he strove again to bring his limbs back to life, but still ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... and sharp. The verdict had been given beforehand. He was now accused of another horrible crime. He had actually described himself as the fourth person in the Godhead! The charge was monstrous. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; soon alone shall fancy follow sadly in her flight Where the fiery dust of evening, shaken from the feet of light, Thrusts its monstrous barriers between the pure, the good, the true, That our weeping eyes may strain for, but shall never after view. Only yester eve I watched with heart at rest the nebulae Looming far within the shadowy shining of the Milky Way; Finding in the stillness ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... of Mr. Pickwick is specially shown in the case of Jingle, whom he pursued with an animosity that was almost frantic. One would think it was some public enemy he was hunting down for the public good. Poor Jingle had really done nothing so monstrous, after all. He had "chaffed" Dr. Slammer, "run off" with the spinster aunt—nothing so uncommon in those days—had been consigned to the Fleet for non-payment of his debts, and there showed penitence and other signs of a good heart. His one serious offence was passing himself off ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... be deferred for the moment. I commend you meanwhile to perfect quietness; one movement, and the consequences may be fatal. A hint is sufficient. I perceive here a lady in distress. 'Tis a monstrous pity, indeed. I regret that we were unaware of the presence of a lady; had we known, we should certainly have taken our measures more fittingly. I crave your pardon. No one has yet accused Captain Lingo of rudeness to a lady. Ketch, put up thy cutlass ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... visible the bluish or greenish iridescence of the glaciers which are bared and gleam down upon the valley below. At the edge of this iridescence, there where it seems from the distance like a fringe of gems, a nearer view reveals confused masses of wild and monstrous boulders, slabs, and fragments piled up in chaotic fashion. In very hot and long summers, the ice-fields are denuded even in the higher regions, and then a much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the meaning of that historic document, and after long and vigilant labor I found two pronouncements. What was the first? The statement that staggered the sensibilities of the civilization of the world, the unthinkable, monstrous proposal, that in the midst of the uncertainty of the hour, a separate peace ought to be made with Germany. I want you to go back with me just a year and a half, to the time when victory was son; to the time when our boys maintained their ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... the great evils of revolutions in France is that each offers a fresh premium to the ambitions of the lower classes. To get out of his condition, to make his fortune (which is regarded to-day as the only social standard), the working-man throws himself into some of those monstrous associations which, if they do not succeed, ought to bring the speculators to account before human justice. This is what ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... your aunt?" demanded Lily. It was monstrous, but she had a very dramatic imagination, and there was a faint hint of ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Foppington, where, directing the hosier not "to thicken the calves of his stockings so much," he says, "You should always remember, Mr. Hosier, that if you make a nobleman's spring legs as robust as his autumnal calves, you commit a monstrous impropriety, and make no allowance for the fatigues of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... perie thus encouraged Buddir ad Deen, and instructed him how he should behave himself, hump-back had really gone out of the room for a moment. The genie went to him in the shape of a monstrous cat, mewing at a most fearful rate. Hump-back called to the cat, he clapped his hands to drive her away, but instead of retreating, she stood upon her hinder feet, staring with her eyes like fire, looking fiercely at him, mewing louder than she did at first, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Woman, As full of frailty as of faith, a poor sleight Woman, And her best thoughts, but weak fortifications, There may be a Mine wrought: Well, let 'em work then, I shall meet with it, till the signs be monstrous, And stick upon my head, I will not believe it, [Stands private. She may be, and she may not, ...
— The Little French Lawyer - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont
... in Paris, Monsieur le Baron," Desmond said, "but it certainly seems to me monstrous, that the man who committed this foul outrage should escape with what is, doubtless, but a ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... marched without making great noise, or singing as accustomed. Sejourning awhile, we came to a lake 6 leagues wide, about it a very pleasant country imbellished with great forests. That day our wild people killed 2 Bears, one monstrous like for its biggnesse, the other a small one. Wee arrived to a fine sandy bancke, where not long before many Cabbanes weare errected and places made ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... not room to insert in the former) that the male moose, in rutting time, swims from island to island, in the lakes and rivers of North America, in pursuit of the females. My friend, the chaplain, saw one killed in the water as it was on that errand in the river St. Lawrence: it was a monstrous beast, he told me; but he did ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... with a sigh. "Ten months! and I have not finished fifty pages of my refutation of Wolfe's monstrous theory! In ten months a child! and I'll be bound complete,—hands, feet, eyes, ears, and nose!—and not like this poor Infant of Mind," and my father pathetically placed his hand on the treatise, "of which nothing is formed ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and being more or less their refuge until the 5th of April, 1621. In some respects the place of their landing has vastly changed. The waterfront is ugly with rough wharves and coal pockets, store-houses and factories. The famous rock itself reposes beneath a monstrous granite canopy and seems to have so little connection with the sea that one at first sight is inclined to levity, wondering where the landing party got the gang plank which bridged such a distance. Yet it was in all reverence that I sought Plymouth, hoping ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... of the Chaldaean gods—Genii hostile to men, their monstrous shapes; the south-west wind; friendly genii—The Seven, and their attacks on the moon-god; Gibil, the fire-god, overcomes them and their snares—The Sumerian gods; Ningirsu: the difficulty of defining them and of understanding the nature of them; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of military conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... inured to sport, hard as iron, supple as a whip, with his science picked up from Swedish quartermasters and Japanese gendarmes, from mates and crimps in all parts of the world, would always be in her eyes an infant compared to the monstrous Syrian! Not that it mattered a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... writing in 1857, said that Young "by the native force and vigor of a strong mind" had taken from beneath the Mormon church system "the monstrous stilts of a miserable superstition, and consolidated it into a compact scheme of the sternest fanaticism."* In other words, he might have explained, instead of relying on such "revelations" as served Smith, he refused to use artificial commands of God, and substituted the commands of Young, teaching, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Lately I discovered that the children who see me with Grizel call me 'the Man with the Greetin' Eyes.' If I have greetin' eyes it was real grief that gave them to me; but when I heard what I was called it made me self-conscious, and I have tried to look still more lugubrious ever since. It seems monstrous to you, but that, I believe, is the kind of thing I shall always be doing. But it does not mean that I feel no real remorse. They were greetin' eyes before I knew it, and though I may pose grotesquely as a fine fellow for finding Grizel a home ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... much, except that I should have thought that any colleague of mine, even an entirely new Professor in a provincial university, would have recognised the propriety of at least communicating to me his intention before committing this monstrous plagiarism. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... told him that somewhere, a long way off, there dwelt three dreadful sisters, monstrous ogrish women, with golden wings and claws of brass, and with serpents growing on their heads instead of hair. Now these women were so awful to look on that whoever saw them was turned at once into stone. And two of them could not be put to death, but the youngest, whose face ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... her veils; And jars of spice, and gilded ears of corn, And wine-red roses and rose-red wine-grails Feed her long trances while the far flutes mourn. She lies and dreams daemonic passionate things: Cherubim guard her gates with monstrous wings. ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man with the gentlest solicitude—had made a litter for him and escorted him carefully from the spot—had then caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... forward, grasped the rattling handle and pushed. The little signal bell above the door went off with a monstrous 'ding' that rang through his spine, and in a condition of feverish moistness he entered, and, halting a pace within, saw in blurred fashion, and seemingly at a great distance, the loveliest thing ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... having accepted his hospitality, to turn round at the end and insult the man in his own house? This seemed to Brown, J. P., a monstrous and astounding performance. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the actual outbreak of persecution and the death of Cranmer all restraint was thrown aside. In his "First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" Knox denounced Mary as a Jezebel, a traitress, and a bastard. He declared the rule of women to be against the law of Nature and of God. The duty, whether of the estates or people of the realm, was ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... jaws of death, must be a very serious one! It might be very hard, it might be even unfair treatment—she could not tell; but there must be something to explain it—something to show it not altogether the monstrous thing it seemed! I do not say she reasoned thus, but her genius ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... monstrous affair, that dam. The old part was built on and from solid rock, being really a jutting out of a lime stone cliff which had stood high and dry before the water had been dammed up by the heavy timber cribs cutting across the original stream. Concrete abutments secured these timbers ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... strong young soul, surged joy of freedom and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the conjugal is natural, while loyalty, filial obedience, and the rest were invented by the sages, and have been maintained by their authority ever since.' Surely, among all heresies from ancient days until now, none has been so monstrous as this."[AY] ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... rendered him some assistance? Indeed some present said, 'We could have swam to him if we had tried.' Then I would ask, 'Why didn't they make a venture?' The conduct of these spectators I regard as being monstrous and unmanly. Englishmen are generally thought to have a fair share of personal courage, but it is nevertheless a fact, that scores of them watched the struggles of this drowning youth, but took care to watch them only from the shore. Can we wonder that ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... tremendous step had been taken, the great difficulties which beset the monstrous conception of the celestial sphere vanished, for the stars need no longer be regarded as situated at equal distances from the earth. Copernicus saw that they might lie at the most varied degrees of remoteness, some being hundreds or thousands of times farther away than others. The complicated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the history of Bernal Diaz? We have seen that it cuts down the monstrous exaggerations of Cortez more than a half, yet we shall see that the statements of Diaz are still incredible. It is a very religious book, as the Spaniards understand the word religion, and reflects ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... many tracks in the scrub the black wallabiesand paddy-melons hopped low. In the open glades among the great gum-trees marched the stately emu, and tall kangaroos, seven feet high, stood erect on their monstrous hind-legs, their little fore-paws hanging in front, and their small faces looking as innocent ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... won't," interrupted the boy; "it's a monstrous big wood they've got to pass through before they can come here, so we have time to look at ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... principal man of the country by his own hand, without law or legal process. It is Captain Williams,—one of those British officers whom Mr. Hastings states to be the pests of the country. This is the man who comes here as evidence against these women, and produces this monstrous paper. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... his private consulting practice. But, Clayton! there was an irreparable loss! Poor boy! Some momentary imprudence must have exposed him. Thugs! Thugs! Here in New York, in broad day light! It is monstrous!" ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... native population separately, but throughout the population of the country, as a whole, including the foreigners. The climax of this movement was reached when, during the decade 1880-90, the foreign arrivals rose to the monstrous total of five and a quarter millions (twice what had ever before been known), while the population, even including this enormous re-enforcement, increased more slowly than in any other period of our history except, possibly, that ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... leading part in setting the fiat money system going is true; that speculation and interested financiers made it worse is also true: but the men who had charge of French finance during the Reign of Terror and who made these experiments, which seem to us so monstrous, in order to rescue themselves and their country from the flood which was sweeping everything to financial ruin were universally recognized as among the most skillful and honest financiers in Europe. Cambon, especially, ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... from contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless he succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... more on the possibility of adapting some favorite bits from the baronial antiquities to modern needs than on anything so terrestrial as air. Therefore he awoke as from a dream, and taking two or three monstrous inhalations, he seized the plans and began looking over them with new energy. Meanwhile I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... new. With such like decorations I have been adorned in my own country by those same honorable and truthful men, i. e., by the men whose own conscience convicts them of wrong-doing, and who are trying to put their own monstrous doings off on me, and to glorify their own shame by bringing shame to me. But you will deign, blessed Father, to hear the true case from me, though I am but an uncouth child. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... As a monstrous development in the calf may hinder calving, it is well to consider shortly the different directions in which these deviations from the natural form appear. Their origin and significance will be rendered clearer if we divide them according to the fault ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... used the only argument that could have convinced her. Strange irony of fate! I calmed her, I persuaded her not to act— I, who had suddenly conceived the monstrous notion that the doer of the murderous deed, the docile instrument in my stepfather's hands, was this infamous brother—that Edmond Termonde and Rochdale were ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... now and then protruding above the water. From its active and unsteady motions, Jack knew it was making up its mind to attack us; so he urged us vehemently to paddle for our lives, while he himself set us the example. Suddenly he shouted, "Look out! there he comes!" and in a second we saw the monstrous fish dive close under us and turn half-over on his side. But we all made a great commotion with our paddles, which, no doubt, frightened it away for that time, as we saw it immediately after circling round us ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... you have humanity's right to be free. It is an honourable right. You gave it up when you took that veil, not knowing what it was that you gave up. You have done no wrong. You have done nothing that any loving maiden need be ashamed of. I kissed you, for you could not help yourself. That is the monstrous crime which you say is to be punished with eternal damnation. It is monstrous that you should think so. It is blasphemy to say that God made woman to lead a life of suffering and daily misery, chained to a cross which it is agony to look at, and ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberate atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... us, there is a way of gospel government, of such beauty and excellency, as our eyes never yet beheld, nor the eyes of our forefathers; to the end, that we may be ashamed of all our former idolatries and superstitions, our monstrous mixtures of popery and will-worship in the ordinances of Christ; and that we have not sooner inquired after the mind of Christ, how He will be worshipped in His house; but now, unless we be ashamed, i.e., deeply and thoroughly ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... on their heels with their heads against the wall. They were at least five times as big as Dorothy herself, and had price-tickets tucked into their sashes, such as "2/6, CHEAP," "5s., REAL WAX," and so on; and Dorothy, clapping her hands in an ecstasy of delight, exclaimed: "Why, it's a monstrous, enormous toy-shop!" and then she hurried on to see what else ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... ruins!" When Waltraute with cries of "Woe!" flees to horse, she looks after her unmoved: "Lightning-charged cloud, borne by the wind, go your stormy way! Nevermore steer your course toward me!" She has no regrets; the request has been in her judgment so monstrous that it has hardened and shut her heart toward those who made it. She gazes quietly over the landscape. Her sense of security in Siegfried's love is no doubt at its firmest in these moments following her fiery defence of it, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... — and how we tried once or twice to eat him out of house and home. At the pastrycook's we may have over-eaten ourselves (I have admitted half-a-crown's worth for my own part, but I don't like to mention the real figure for fear of perverting the present generation of boys by my monstrous confession) — we may have eaten too much, I say. We did; but what then? The school apothecary was sent for: a couple of small globules at night, a trifling preparation of senna in the morning, and we had not to go to school, so that the draught ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... then flew by a monstrous crow As big as a tar-barrel, Which frightened both the heroes so They quite forgot ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown
... to a crab which lives on the cocoa-nuts; it is very common on all parts of the dry land, and grows to a monstrous size: it is closely allied or identical with the Birgos latro. The front pair of legs terminate in very strong and heavy pincers, and the last pair are fitted with others weaker and much narrower. It would at first be thought quite impossible for ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the author who is said to have written a history now going about under the title of 'Second Part of the Achievements of Don Quixote of La Mancha,' they beg of him on my behalf as earnestly as they can to forgive me for having been, without intending it, the cause of his writing so many and such monstrous absurdities as he has written in it; for I am leaving the world with a feeling of compunction at having provoked him ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... about thee (Will)? Weele take him up; sure, we shall get a monstrous deale of mony ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... scarcely spoken before the enormous billow, a monstrous wave forty feet high, broke over the fugitives with a fearful noise. Men and animals all disappeared in a whirl of foam; a liquid mass, weighing several millions of tons, engulfed them in its ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... there is not the remotest touch of insanity. He is the sanest of all the great writers; perhaps the only sane one. What he has the power of communicating to us is a renewal of that physiological energy, which alone makes it possible to enjoy this monstrous world. Other writers interpret things, or warn us against things. Rabelais takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not wine, as a symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... face. But this time to confront the enemy. There were three of them, as monstrous as those Vye and Hume had fought in the same place. And one of them was wounded, swinging a charred forepaw before it, and giving voice to a ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... open negotiations for the exchange of prisoners on the very basis he had suggested long before. Believing, moreover, that European princes had by this time lost their delicate sensibility, it seemed no monstrous crime to consolidate his empire for its commercial siege by the simple expedient of removing the Duke of Oldenburg from his hereditary domains which bordered on the ocean and offering him the inland sovereignty of Erfurt, or by ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... ye; ye're not fit to manage these things. Well, it's a monstrous price, and I've had to pay it because of your obstinacy. I shan't forget that when I ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I said, "about his treatment of infinitives. He may split them all to smithereens if he likes. It's the monstrous nature of his demand that ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... have spied upon us all these days—suspected us—accused us in your thoughts? You have pretended friendship, devotion—God knows what monstrous lie—and all the while you spied—spied. But you shall have your answer in your single word. No, Monsieur La Mothe; such women as I am do not plot against their King, nor teach sons to revolt ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... not for the cursed bore of keeping up the farce beyond the possibility of keeping up the fun, such a rig as this would be incomparably pleasant; but"—yawning—"that's the devil! I get monstrous tired of a joke ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... say a few words here, by way of referring back all this monstrous heap of violence and absurdity to some degree of principle. Mr. Hastings having completely acquitted the Rajah of any other fault than contumacy, and having supposed even that to be only personal to himself, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... eh?"—thanks to his feeling it actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence in the young man's favour. He repeatedly knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad's case—whatever else of minor interest it might yield—was first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer, could—COULD it?—signify. "It's a plot," he declared—"there's more in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to his fancy. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been. If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible. But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity. ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... double allowance of vituline brains deserve such honor, there are few commentators on Shakspeare that would have gone afoot, and the trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our minds too many monstrous and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various |
