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Distortion   /dɪstˈɔrʃən/   Listen
Distortion

noun
1.
A change for the worse.  Synonym: deformation.
2.
A shape resulting from distortion.  Synonym: distorted shape.
3.
An optical phenomenon resulting from the failure of a lens or mirror to produce a good image.  Synonyms: aberration, optical aberration.
4.
A change (usually undesired) in the waveform of an acoustic or analog electrical signal; the difference between two measurements of a signal (as between the input and output signal).
5.
The act of distorting something so it seems to mean something it was not intended to mean.  Synonyms: overrefinement, straining, torture, twisting.
6.
The mistake of misrepresenting the facts.



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"Distortion" Quotes from Famous Books



... him: the reading of the narrative had left its mark on them already. A distortion at the corners of his mouth, which had been barely noticeable when Mr. Neal entered the room, was plainly visible now. His slow articulation labored more and more painfully with every word he uttered. The position was emphatically a terrible one. After a moment ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures, depends on such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune, and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata, is redeemed into something like elevated character, merely by the light of the linen window from which it takes ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... optics the distinction is easily seen when the work is put to trial; but here too, as in drawing, it requires an educated eye to tell the difference when the work is only moderately bad; but with "bold" work, nothing can be seen but distortion and fog: and I heartily wish the same result would follow the same kind of handling in drawing; but here, the boldness cheats the unlearned by looking like the precision of the true man. It is very strange how ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... maintained that immovable pose more successfully. I mean as to body and limbs; with the face there was a difference. By fleeting revealments of the face I saw that something was happening—something out of the common. There would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening to Jim. I mean if ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, "wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful—the creation of form. Thus have they created the finest works ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... may ask, how about the automobile picture? That also is an unblushing fake. Of course I must prove that. In the first place, you know that the general public has come to recognise the distortion of a photograph as denoting speed. A picture of a car in a race that doesn't lean is rejected - people demand to see speed, speed, more speed even in pictures. Distortion does indeed show speed, but that, too, can ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... as individualism, in its capacity of a moral factor, grows in potency. The domineering, self-assertive, so-called master-morality of Nietzsche, itself akin in some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, by morbid distortion, the humble, self-denying ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... distortion. The old man, full of days, lay calmly asleep, and Paul Capel bent down ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn

... looked and felt a recoil of more than ordinary dislike for the man. The latter had put the paper in his pocket and was coming their way. His face, once possibly handsome, for his eyes and forehead were conspicuously fine, showed a distortion quite apart from that given by his physical disfigurement. He was not simply angry but in a mental and moral rage, and it made him more than hideous; it made him appalling. Yet he said nothing and moved along very quietly, making, to all appearance, ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... the principal cause at first of the misunderstanding of the doctrine, and afterward of the complete distortion of it. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. And every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of Wagner's own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now presents us. We shall ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... little contragravity-field distortion effect. It was still too far to be sure. He went back to his lunch. He had finished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a red light flashed and a voice from one ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper

... determined by his sense of proportion. He may distort an object to any extent or leave it as vague as the shadow on a wall in diffused light, or he may make it precise and particular as ever Jan Van Eyck did; so only that its distortion or elaboration is so proportioned to the other objects and intentions of his work as to promote its success in the eyes of ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... which is commonly identified with the Sanskrit Syama, dark or brown.[189] But the names Shan and A-hom seem to be variants of the same word and Syama is possibly not its origin but a learned and artificial distortion.[190] The Lao were another division of the same race who occupied the country now called Laos before the Tai had moved into Siam. This movement was gradual and until the beginning of the twelfth century they merely established small principalities, the principal of which was Lamphun,[191] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... Also it was proving a wonderful educator on such large questions as government ownership of elevators, the tariff, control of public service corporations and so forth. The farmer was getting information which he had never been able to obtain before and he was getting it without distortion, uncolored by convenient ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... means of control. We do this for the attainment of power, for the conserving of energy, for the insuring of endurance and ease of operation. This is the end in the training of the voice. It is to avoid friction. It is to prevent nervous strain, muscular distortion, and failing power, and to secure easy response to the will of the speaker. The point not wholly understood or heeded is that, as a rule, the unpleasing voice is an indication of ill adjustment and friction. It denotes a mechanism wearing on itself—it ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... to bear with the foibles of things and people which he saw with the most disconcerting clarity. And, as there is no good cause, nor any good man, who, seen at a certain angle or with a certain distortion, does not present a ridiculous aspect, there was nothing that, with his ironic disposition, he could go on respecting for long. All this was not calculated to make him friends. And yet he was always ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... mouth better than her own sonorous native language, and when in conversation she would look me one of those dreamy glances which had at the first set my heart in agitation, it perfectly bewildered me. You needn't smile, Langley, (poor Bill's face was guilty of no such distortion,) but if your little danseuse should practice for years, she couldn't attain to the delicious glance which my handsome creole girl can give you. The heavily-fringed eyelid is just raised, so that you can look as if for an interminable distance into the beautiful orb beneath, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... always easy to say definitely whether a bone is broken or not. In general, however, the following are signs of fracture:—(1) Loss of power in the limb; (2) Swelling or pain at the injured spot; (3) Distortion of the limb, usually shorter than natural; gentle pulling makes it temporarily regain its natural position; (4) When the limb is gently moved, it moves at some spot between the joints, and a grating sound is heard; (5) In case of a bone which lies near the skin, a touch ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... of College chimney-pieces with the photographic portraits of all the owner's College friends, had just then come into fashion, Mr. Verdant Green's beaming countenance and spectacles were daguerreotyped in every variety of Ethiopian distortion; and, being enclosed in miniature frames, were distributed as souvenirs among his ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... development has already been interrupted. It is somewhat remarkable that Froebel anticipated even the conclusions of modern psycho-analysis in his views about childish faults. "The sources of these," he says, are "neglect to develop certain sides of human life and, secondly, early distortion of originally good human powers by arbitrary interference with the orderly course of human development ... a suppressed or perverted good quality—a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood or misguided—lies ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... ever granted, I would rest My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast, Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, 25 Back to its proper size again, and smoothing Distortion down till every nerve had soothing, And all ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... become habitual, when the temper of it is acquired, what was before confinement ceases to be so by becoming choice and delight. Whatever restraint and guard upon ourselves may be needful to unlearn any unnatural distortion or odd gesture, yet in all propriety of speech, natural behaviour must be the most easy and unrestrained. It is manifest that, in the common course of life, there is seldom any inconsistency between our duty and what is called interest: it is much ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... Blucher was rewarded with the title of Prince von der Wahlstatt, but his soldiers surnamed him Marshal Vorwarts. On the decline of the floods, the banks of the rivers were strewn with corpses sticking in horrid distortion out of the mud. A part of the French fled for a couple of days in terrible disorder along the right bank and were then taken prisoner together with their general, Puthod.[4] The French lost one hundred and three guns, eighteen thousand prisoners, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... said Uncle Richard; "and the first thing is to make our mould or gauge, for everything we do must be so exact that we can set distortion at defiance. We must have no ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... strength. I had, the November before, a slight paralysis in the face, which affected the muscles of the lower lid of one of my eyes, causing a constant irritation in the organ itself. After a time this caused a distortion of the lips, which I concealed somewhat by a moustache. But it operated, for a little while, as an effective disguise. When I came home during the winter, an old conductor on the Boston & Albany Railroad, whom I had known quite ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... British policy in Africa. When I was a prisoner at Pretoria the Boers showed me a large green pamphlet Mr. Reitz had written. It was intended to be an account of the Dutch grounds of quarrel with the English, and was called 'A Century of Wrong.' Much was distortion and exaggeration, but a considerable part dealt with acknowledged facts. Wrong in plenty there has been on both sides, but latterly more on theirs than on ours; and the result is war—bitter, bloody war tearing the land ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... if that deed were not foul enough, he caused the old priest to carve—being skilful with the chisel—that vile distortion of his dead friend's face out of a huge boulder lying by, and then murdered him too for the Ruby's sake, and tumbled their bodies into the trough together. Such was Amos Trenoweth. Are you proud ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... could not speak. He was terrified by the havoc which grief had made of the noble and intelligent face of his friend. He was shocked at the distortion of his features, the unnatural brilliancy of his eyes, and the convulsive laugh on ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau

... garland of ivy round his head, and, seated on the ground, is labouring to draw on his hose, hindered by his limbs being wet. Hearing the sound of the drums and the cries of the soldiers he struggles violently to get on one of his stockings; the action of the muscles and distortion of the mouth evince the zeal of his efforts. Drummers and others hasten to the camp with their clothes in their arms, all in the most singular attitudes; some standing, others kneeling or stooping; some ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... ever thinks of the dead. At times of course one suspects, one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been stirring up ugly and monstrous memories, of distortion, disfigurement, torment and decay, of dead men in stained and ragged clothes, with their sole-worn boots drawn up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... the sounds uttered by Dave, for they were more like an accident in a wooden clock, when the wheels run down and finish with a jerk which breaks the cogs. But that was Dave's way of laughing, and it ended with a horrible distortion of his features. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... my first experience of it. I formed an opinion, a morbid dislike of it then, and have not changed it. The benefit, however, of "squad drill" can not be overestimated. It makes the most crooked, distorted creature an erect, noble, and manly being, provided, of course, this distortion be a result of habit and not a natural deformity, the result of laziness in one's walking, such as hanging the head, dropping the shoulders, not straightening the legs, and crossing ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... even know that," I retorted. "There is something abnormal about the light-waves coming from it. Not exactly blurred, but a distortion, a fading. It's ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... it on a man so devoted to me that he would bear the guilt in my stead, and a hundred thousand times worse if I had then held up that man to the execration of mankind, and tortured him with every distortion of evidence which great falsehoods can put upon a little truth. That would indeed have been far worse than anything I have done. God may find forgiveness for murderers, but there is only hell for traitors, and the hell of hells is the place ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford

... entirely to society for, according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... against his, while she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the outburst ceased with that strange abruptness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an open-mouthed ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... inclined men like Newman or Manning to the Catholic faith? Has any Catholic writer of our time been able to present fairly the arguments which seem so overwhelmingly convincing to Protestant thinkers? In either case, is there not something of distortion or exaggeration? Certainly it cannot be due to intentional and perverse obliquity of mental vision. As a rule reasonable men endeavour to be just and fair. Now and then, in the heat of controversy, a tendency to overstatement or exaggeration may be evident, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... the challenge boldly with the declaration that Senator Chamberlain's statement was "an astonishing and unjustifiable distortion of the truth," and must have been due to disloyalty to the Administration. Chamberlain's reply, while admitting that he might have overstated his case, was a proclamation of loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and an appeal for getting down to the ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... the spectacle with smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... restrict our attention to the history of Christianity, but to institute a comparative study of religions, ethnic or revealed, in order to trace the action of reason in the collective religious history of the race. Whether the religions of nature be regarded as the distortion of primitive traditions, or as the spontaneous creation of the religious faculties, the agreement or contrast suggested by a comparison of them with the Hebrew and Christian religions, which are preternaturally revealed, is most important as a means of discovering ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things. "Mother—mother's a ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... this, hates what he cannot understand. According to Isaac Taylor, "Fanaticism is enthusiasm inflamed by hatred." But Christ exaggerated nothing and hated no man. He hated sin, but no sinner. His boundless, tender love itself prevented such moral distortion. And, therefore, he is the ideal or model of human life. We do not feel that in striving to imitate even his most spiritual qualities we shall become impractical or unnatural. We do not feel this in the case of most other holy men. They become examples of one virtue by exaggerating it. But ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves

... hair, and beats himself against the ground, meanwhile uttering the most piercing cries, until he is quite exhausted. The cold then deprives him of all motion and feeling, his body becomes much swollen, and fearful distortion of the features is produced by the dreadful convulsions he is suffering, while the surface of his skin becomes nearly black. The only remedy the natives know of is to scourge each other, and to drink the cold water from the springs, which ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... the Kahal" was printed at public expense and sent out to all Government offices to serve as a guide for Russian officials and enable them to fight the "Inner enemy." It was in vain that Brafman's ignorance of rabbinic lore and his entire distortion of the role played by the Kahal in days gone-by was exposed by Jewish writers in articles and monographs; it was in vain that the Jewish members of the commission appointed by the governor-general of Vilna protested against the barbarous proposals of the informer. The authorities of St. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... a single apartment, and the great smooth roof was enlarged on the screen to the absolute maximum clarity, till further magnification simply resulted in worse stratospheric distortion. On the broad roof were white strips of some material, making a huge V followed by two I's. Russ watched, his hand on the control steadying the view under the Earth's complicated orbital motion, and rotation, further corrections for the ship's orbital motion making the ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell

... of a reformer, and especially towards women; he sees what they need, and what causes are injuring them. From the histories of Fleur de Marie and La Louve, from the lovely and independent character of Rigolette, from the distortion given to Matilda's mind, by the present views of marriage, and from the truly noble and immortal character of the "hump-backed Sempstress" in the "Wandering Jew," may be gathered much that shall elucidate doubt and direct inquiry on this subject. In reform, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... influence is at the bottom of all the wonderful tales, stories and legends of supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery, etc., with which the pages of history are filled. There is of course always to be found much distortion and exaggeration in these legends and tales, but they have truth at the bottom of them. In this connection, let me call your attention to a very important psychic principle involved. I have told you that by denying ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered, that his life was a "long disease." His most frequent assailant was the headache, which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... monsters which these Frankensteins had created from the relics and the offal of the holiest sepulchres. The head of a giant on the limbs of a dwarf, incongruous members jumbled together, parts fair and beautiful,—the whole a hideous distortion! ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... in average condition, the percentage seldom exceeds fifty per cent, and more frequently is lower than higher." The superiority of the refractor in regard to definition arises from the fact that any distortion at the surface of a mirror affects the direction of a ray of light three times as much as the same distortion would do at the surface of a lens. And this applies equally both to permanent errors of curvature and to temporary distortions produced ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... there limped out of Chihuahua hospital a discharged patient, wry-necked, crook-backed, with drawn features, and hair and beard streaked with gray. It was Dick Lane, restored to old physical strength, so far as the distortion of his spine, caused by his torture, permitted, and to the full possession of his mental faculties. He mounted one of the captured ponies, and rode off with the proceeds of the sales of the others in his ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... of folly and quickness of hearing is not suggested by the size of the ear: in other respects it is even finer, joining the idea of fury, in the wolf on which he rides, with that of corruption on his lips, and of discoloration or distortion in the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... was her mother's prohibition. And truly, when her mother was asleep, she glided down into the park, and Napoleon welcomed her with a happy smile, and arm in arm, happy as children, they wandered through the paths, laughing at their own shadows, which the light of the moon in wondrous distortion made to dance before them. They entered into a small bower, which stood in the shadow of trees, and there the young Napoleon had prepared for the young maid a very pleasing surprise. There on the table was a basket full of her favorite fruit—full of the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach

... depresses his hearers in their own opinion, or debars them from the hope of contributing reciprocally to the entertainment of the company. Merriment, extorted by sallies of imagination, sprightliness of remark, or quickness of reply, is too often what the Latins call, the Sardinian laughter, a distortion of the face without gladness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... Cabin," published two years after the Compromise of 1850. Her stirring tale set forth the worst features of slavery in vivid word pictures that caught and held the attention of millions of readers. Though the book was unfair to the South and was denounced as a hideous distortion of the truth, it was quickly dramatized and played in every city and town throughout the North. Topsy, Little Eva, Uncle Tom, the fleeing slave, Eliza Harris, and the cruel slave driver, Simon Legree, with his baying blood hounds, became living specters in many a home that ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... suddenly came a rude bumping shove upwards as from below, and then another—the Rob Roy had grounded. Soon there was a swaying this way and that, as if yet undecided, and at length a positive heel over to that; the whole of my little world within being canted to half a right angle, and a ridiculous distortion of every single thing in my bedroom was the result. The humiliating sensation of being aground on hard unromantic mud is tempered by the ludicrous crooked appearance of the contents of your cabin and by the absurd sensation of sleeping in a corner with everything askance except the lamp flame, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... and bounded to the window, bringing his leg-of-mutton fist against it with a blow that crashed the whole plate of glass into splinters. His face was purple, his eyes half out of their sockets. There was froth upon his lips, with such a general distortion of features that it would be impossible to figure a more horrible illustration of madness than his countenance. I bolted as if the devil had been after me, catching just a glimpse of the powerful creature wrestling in the grasp of the two seamen ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... blaring and glaring and froth and distortion," she replied, sweeping her hand across the issue which lay on the desk before her. "Can you do that sort of thing and not become that ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... debauch, all equally abuse their strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat it is brought about by ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... and hard, and prided myself on breaking the bruised reed, and quenching the smoking flax. Time was when I should have been the loudest in denouncing poor Camille; but I have long since seemed to see in those words the distortion of an almighty truth—a truth that shall shake thrones, and principalities, and powers, and fill the earth with its sound, as with the trump of God; a prophecy like Balaam's of old—'I shall see Him, but not nigh; I shall behold Him, but not near.'... Take all the heroes, prophets, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... come the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study. That there will be an outbreak somewhere ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... nature, and making it consist of a group of eternal schemes, or forms, of which natural things are merely transient phantoms, and which can be reached by only a few aristocratic souls, born to rule the rest. On the basis of this distortion he constructed his Republic, in which complete despotism is exercised by the philosophers through the military; man is reduced to a machine, his affections and will being disregarded; community of women and of property is the law; and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... never saw but one corpse, and that was of a sailor drowned in mid ocean, and I shall never be able to forget its ghastliness and distortion as it lay on deck, under ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... earth with a fine sprinkle of shade. Their gnarled and knotted trunks, a thousand years old, were frequently split into three or four distinct and separate trees, which in the process assumed forms so marvellously human in their distortion, that I could scarcely believe them to be accidental. Dore never drew anything so weird and grotesque. Here were two club-headed individuals righting, with interlocked knees, convulsed shoulders, and fists full of each other's hair; yonder a bully was threatening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple medium, and native levies advance distortion to the point of art; but the language sounds no less good in the chilly ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... no fury—no defiance—not even the passing distortion of physical suffering in his features, as he now looked on her. Blank, rigid horror—tearless, voiceless, helpless despair, seemed to have petrified the expression of his face into an everlasting form, unyouthful and unhopeful—as if he had been imprisoned from his childhood, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... other, each tends to draw the other out into an ellipsoidal figure; they must be more rigid than steel to resist this — and even then they cannot altogether resist. If they are liquid or gaseous they will yield readily to the force of distortion, the amount of which will depend upon their distance apart, for the nearer they are the greater becomes the tidal strain. If they are encrusted without and liquid or gaseous in the interior, the internal mass will strive to ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... considered as the finest pen-line of a Raphael drawing. Every joint of the stone is used, in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign of preeminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb into the stone of ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... theory of alterations held quite well, for low-order variables. Wherever we appeared, whatever we did, we set up a definite friction in the normal time-stream, a distortion, like pulling a taut rubber band out. And we could produce changes—on low-order variables. But the elasticity of the distortion was so great as to warp the change back into the time-stream without ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse

... which, among others, Mendelssohn also affirmed that for him nothing more enchanting existed." But enough of subjective fancies. This study contains much beauty, and every bar rules over a little harmonic kingdom of its own. It is so lovely that not even the Brahms' distortion in double notes or the version in octaves can dull its magnetic crooning. At times so delicate is its design that it recalls the faint fantastic tracery made by frost on glass. In all instances ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... they are fifty-nine. Who, then, is the fifty- ninth? Cromwell's young kinsman, Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, who, though a member of the Court, had attended none of its meetings till precisely that of the 29th, the date of the Warrant. Here comes in Clarendon's famous story, a distortion of some convenient rigmarole of Ingoldsby's own in later times. Ingoldsby, says Clarendon, "always abhorring the action in his heart," had purposely kept away from every meeting of the Court, till, chancing to look into the Painted Chamber on the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... interesting people. There was a quality in that autobiography which seemed to demand parody, and no doubt the autobiographer who cannot wait for posterity and perspective will pardon a little contemporary distortion. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain

... a wide difference between folk-lore of the so-called Old World and that of America. Transmitted orally through countless generations, the folk-stories of our ancestors show many evidences of distortion and of change in material particulars; but the Indian seems to have been too fond of nature and too proud of tradition to have forgotten or changed the teachings of his forefathers. Childlike in simplicity, ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman

... multitude of obstacles hindered them. Tortuous ridges of rock lay directly across their path, formations that had been whipped in some mad, eon-old convulsion and then, through the ages, remained frozen into their present distortion; black pits gaped suddenly before them; half-seen stalagmites, whose crystalline edges were razor-sharp, tore through to their flesh. Haste was perilous where every moment they might stumble into an unseen cleft and ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... least as a rather vulgar bit of claptrap. If any reader will take the trouble to compare De Quincey's account of a kind of anticipation of the Balaclava charge at the battle of Talavera, with Napier's description of the same facts, he will be amused at the distortion of history; but whatever the accuracy of the statements, one is a little shocked at finding 'the inspiration of God' attributed to the gallant dragoons who were cut to pieces on that occasion, as other gallant men have been ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... that his attention was fixed on the windowpane on which he spat because there was a flower there. During an attack he was heard to say something about the struggle of men against being raped by ions and flowers. In these primitive elaborations we find an effort at distortion, a getting away from the absolutely crude and that the added elements which cause this distortion are in the form of ideas which imply a certain degree of philosophizing. The truly constructive delusions appear when he has ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... considerable wonder and amusement. They were decidedly metropolitan in size, and carried a tremendous amount of advertising. Early in his perusal he caught the personal bias of the news. Without distortion to the point of literal inaccuracy, nevertheless by skilful use of headlines and by manipulation of the point of view, all items were made to subserve a purpose. In local affairs the most vulgar nicknaming, the most ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... much as the conviction that she had managed to scratch his face abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He imagined the adorned tale making its way through the garrison of the town, through the whole army on the frontier, with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance, spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of his taste even to the very ears of his honourable family. It was all very well for ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... face was beautiful in feature (the next to it was a grinning monkey), but it was not the features that were the most striking part. There was a half-open mouth, not in any way distorted out of its exquisite beauty by the intense expression of suffering it conveyed. Any distortion of the face by mental agony implies that a struggle with circumstance is going on. But in this face, if such struggle had been, it was over now. Circumstance had conquered; and there was no hope from mortal endeavour, or help from mortal creature to be had. But the eyes looked onward and upward ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... of the high priest differs from other words of our Lord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages, in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics or meaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, His claims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on the ground of these, of branding Him as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty, audacious nonsense, and ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... to some of the misconceived facts which gave it origin and credence. It may not appear to be necessary that such examination should be directed to any mode of collecting and comparing signs which would amount to their distortion. It is useful, however, to explain that distortion would result from following the views of a recent essayist, who takes the ground that the description of signs should be made according to a "mean" or average. There ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... monstrous dream By painful introversion; rather fill Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth: But see thou cherish higher hope than this; A hope hereafter that thou shalt be fit Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit Transparent among other forms of youth Who own no impulse save to God ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... this picture is well enough, pleasant in colour and tastefully planned; but his talent would be seen to greater advantage if it did not strut in borrowed and inappropriate plumes. The simplifications and distortion of the head perform, so far as I can see, no aesthetic function whatever; they are not essential to the design, and are at odds with the general rhythm of the picture. Had the painter scribbled across his canvas, "To hell with everything," it seems to me he would have done what he wanted to do, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... effects of the capacity. His meaning was that the increased inductance—a harmful quality in a circuit not having also a harmfully great capacity—would act oppositely to the capacity, and if properly chosen and applied, should decrease or eliminate distortion by making the line's effect on fundamentals and harmonics more nearly uniform, and as well should reduce the attenuation by neutralizing the action of the capacity ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... too, accounted for the persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and spasmodically into a fist, large, heavy-boned ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... they keep out of debt. By no distortion of the text can it be made to mean less. Chalmers on this passage comments as follows: "But though to press the duty of our text in the extreme and rigorous sense of it—yet I would fain aspire towards the ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... undue parade of anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures: But the artist whom we are now considering has no quiescent figures:—even his repose is a state of rigid tension, if not extravagant distortion. He is the Fuseli of novelists. Does he deem it necessary to be energetic, he forthwith begins foaming at the mouth, and falling into convulsions; and this orgasm is so often repeated, and upon such inadequate occasions, that we are perpetually reminded of the tremendous puerilities ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to me so great. I imagine this is because the building remains stationary and a balloon moves. Almost directly below us was one of our party, wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim. It appeared to me that almost instantly his shoulders ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... minds'[4] and Taine's more sweeping attempt to explain literature by environment.[5] Among ourselves, Meredith's Essay on Comedy (1872) brilliantly restated Moliere's dictum that the comic is founded on the real, and not on a fantastic distortion of it, while Matthew Arnold applied alike to literature and to theology a critical insight fertilized by his master Sainte-Beuve's delicate faculty for disengaging the native quality of minds from the incrustations of tradition ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... in their paradises or when otherwise manifesting themselves in celestial splendour. The third is the Nirmana-kaya, or the body of transformation, that is to say the human form worn by Sakyamuni or any other Buddha and regarded as a transformation of his true nature and almost a distortion, because it is so partial and inadequate an expression of it. Later theology regards Amitabha, Amitayus and Sakyamuni as a series corresponding to the three bodies. Amitabha does not really express the whole Dharma-kaya, which is incapable ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice—in the singular and most appalling distortion of her ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard? Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day. Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in the Quarterly Review) as one of the most ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... a circumference of that hollow. Allowing for the distortion of the growths which had formed lumpy excrescences or reached turrets toward the surface—yes, allowing for those—this was decidedly something out of the ordinary! The depression was too regular, too even, Ross was certain of that. With a thrill of excitement he began a descent into the cup, striving ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... given it would be possible, by a long process of projection and calculation, to ascertain the other sizes. The rationale of the architect's geometrical drawings is that on them each plane of the building (the front, the side, the plan, etc.) is shown separately and without any distortion by perspective, and in such a manner that every portion is supposed to be opposite to the eye at once. Only the width of any object on one side can be shown in this way at one view; for the width of the return side you have to look to another drawing; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled to produce an ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... pointed to the glowing sky beyond the church, and as she leaned her head, with eyes closed, on his shoulder, he said with a scurrilous distortion of his face: "Behold! The fire! Hail to the flames! Hail to those whose ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... he never quotes or refers to in the remotest way. The attempt which is often made to show that the New Testament writers have established, by their testimony, the Old Testament canon, as containing just those books which are in our Old Testament, and no more, is a most unwarrantable distortion of the facts. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... guttural noises for about half a minute, shut her eyes, and ran about till she had taken hold of one of the others, whose business it then became to take her station in the centre, so that almost every woman in her turn occupied this post, and in her own peculiar way, either by distortion of countenance or other gestures, performed her part in the game. This continued three-quarters of an hour, and, from the precaution of placing a look-out, who was withdrawn when it was over, as well as from some very expressive signs which need not here be mentioned, there is ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... affirmed that animals develop certain organs to meet the exigencies of their environment. A sole's eye (or is it a sand-dab's?) travels up round its head regardless of appearances when it finds it is more wanted there than on the lower side. We often see a similar distortion in the mental features of the wives of literary men. So perhaps also Magdalen had adapted herself to the Bellairs' environment, with which it was obvious that she had almost nothing in common ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... equal to that which Dollond had long before obtained with the telescope. It is enough for our purpose that we are now in possession of an instrument freed from all confusions and illusions, which magnifies a thousand diameters,—a million times in surface,—without serious distortion ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the God of repressions and denials, and now must speak a little more freely of this travesty on "the Father," as expressed to us in Jesus Christ. Of all the obstacles to the rooting out of fear the lingering belief in such a distortion of Divine Love is to my mind the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... the other hand, these digestive disturbances be accompanied by pain, then another shading appears on our magic mirror, and that is a curious contraction of the mouth, with distortion of the lines surrounding it, so violent in some cases as positively to whiten the lips or produce lines of paleness along the course of the muscles. This is the set or twisted mouth of agony, and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... dispense with correction? The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil. The delusion of the people (on this point) has indeed subsisted for a ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze

... conceal its deformity to the eye, as well as to elude its suggestion to the mind, seems to have been an universal feeling, and it accorded with a fundamental principle of ancient art; that of never permitting violent passion to produce in its representation distortion of form. This may be observed in the Laocoon, where the mouth only opens sufficiently to indicate the suppressed agony of superior humanity, without expressing the loud cry of vulgar suffering. Pausanias considered as a personification of death a female figure, whose teeth and nails, long ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... to our own time to demonstrate that corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism rather than grace ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... the Prince declared that the civil war then in progress in Russia was "accompanied by a spiritual conflict no less determined and portentous," and pointed out that the doctrine of Bolshevism was a deliberate distortion of Marxism, immediate revolution having been substituted by the Bolshevists for the evolution preached by Marx. He went on to say that one of the most striking characteristics of Bolshevism was its pronounced hatred of religion, and especially of Christianity, the ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... the harsh voice and hard, weather-stained features of McBain wreathed in a smile which was a mere distortion, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... That was in New Orleans. The boy's father had aspired to put the face of man upon lasting canvas, but appetite invited whisky to mix with his art, and so upon dead walls he painted the trade-mark bull, and in front of museums he exaggerated the distortion of the ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read

... of heaven, which, when the Roman tyrant beheld, and how much more fresh that laurel was worn with a firm root in the hearts of the people than that which he had torn off, he fell into such a horrid distortion of limbs and countenance, that the senators, who had thought themselves steel and flint at such an object, having hitherto stood in their reverend snow-like thawing Alps, now covered their faces with ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... have arrived at the stage where, by a distortion of a series of phases, the new incident emerges that by means of a human sacrifice the Nile flood can be produced. By a further confusion the goddess, who originally did the slaughter, becomes the victim. Hence the story assumed the form that by means ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... True, the accounts differ, and widely so at times, but that much is to be expected—where were there ever two men who heard or saw the same things in the same way? It is human nature that we should color even transparent fact with the reflected glow of our passions and fancies, and so the distortion becomes inevitable; we should be satisfied if, to-day, we succeed in making out even the broad outlines ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and slave less demoralizing ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... from analogy with a solid is rather misleading, for the forces that operate in the case of a solid sphere that flattens itself and rebounds, are due to the bodily elasticity which enables it not only to resist, but also to recover from any distortion of shape or shearing of its internal parts past each other. But a liquid has no power of recovering from such internal shear, and the only force that checks the spread, and ultimately causes the recovery of shape, is the surface ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington

... political vision. Fueled by a radical ideology and a false belief that the United States is the cause of most problems affecting Muslims today, our enemies seek to expel Western power and influence from the Muslim world and establish regimes that rule according to a violent and intolerant distortion of Islam. As illustrated by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, such regimes would deny all political and religious freedoms and serve as sanctuaries for extremists to launch additional attacks against not only the United States, its allies and partners, but the Muslim world itself. Some among the enemy, ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States

... closer. He saw that she was crying at last. Tears stained her cheeks. Her lips were strange to him in the distortion of a grief that seeks to control itself. He slackened his pace and let her walk ahead. He followed with a sort of awe that there should have been grief for Silas Blackburn after all. He blamed himself because his ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp

... unlike Washington, and for this reason alone the Sharpless miniature, which in all else approximates so closely to Stuart's masterpiece, is preferable. In 1796 Washington was furnished with two sets of "sea-horse" (i.e., hippopotamus) ivory teeth, and they were so much better fitted that the distortion of the mouth ceased to ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we must leave off seeing to them—that would result in our all lying down, shutting our eyes, and starving ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... well-known figures in the journalistic world by way of easy camouflage, so as to evade the law of libel, call your hero-villain Bulmer, attach to him all the legends about actual newspaper kings, add some malicious distortion to make them more exciting and impossible, and thoroughly let yourself go. Good taste alone will decide which is the cleaner sport, and good taste does not happen to be the fashion in certain literary circles at the moment. Of course Mr. GEORGE, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various

... three unfortunate companions and myself, and scalped us. The pain of losing the flesh from my head was most horrible; it made me leap in agonies, and roar like a bull. They then tied us to stakes, and making great fires around us, began to dance in a circle, singing with much distortion and barbarity, and at times putting the palms of their hands to their mouths, set up the war-whoop. As they had on that day also made a great prize of some wine and spirits belonging to our troop, these barbarians, finding ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... and the cheery wood-fire formed a pale reflection of something like comfort, but every bone in his body ached from the recent cold he had taken. He had just fever enough to increase the distortion of the images of his morbid and excited mind. Hour after hour he sat with grim white face and fixed stare, scourging himself with the triple scorpion-whip of remorse, vain regret, and self-disgust. But an old and terrible enemy was stealing on him to change the nature ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman; where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger; ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... then, but was afraid, have put my belief stronger. Unfortunately I have not D. Sharpe's paper here to look over, but I think his chief points [are] (1) the foliation forming great symmetrical curves, and (2) the proof from effects of form of shell (540/2. This refers to the distortion of shells in cleaved rocks.) of the mechanical action in cleaved rocks. The great curvature would be, I think, a grand discovery of Sharpe's, but I confess there is some want of minuteness in the statement of Sharpe which makes me wish to see his facts confirmed. That the foliation and cleavage ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the Slavonic peoples, Russia chose the latter course, the only honourable one open to her. German papers and public speakers retorted that Russia is the patron and protector of assassins—a calculated distortion of the facts intended to have due effect on public opinion. On all sides it was said that Russia had given Serbia secret assurances of help which caused her to become stiff-backed and unrepentant. Fortunately, it is possible to refute the accusation through the pen of a ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... of Newton himself is at least of as much importance to his followers in science as the history of the progress of his real discoveries.—YOUNG, Works, iii. 621. Error is almost always partial truth, and so consists in the exaggeration or distortion of one verity by the suppression of another, which qualifies and modifies the former.—MIVART, Genesis of Species, 3. The attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.—HUXLEY: WARD, Reign of Victoria, ii. 337. Jede neue tief eingreifende ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... lonely woman to her father and her brother. "So men say," is an interesting touch; perhaps conscience tells her midway that she does not quite believe what she is saying. So is the self-conscious recognition of her "bitter burning brain" that interprets all things in a sort of distortion.—Observe, too, how instinctively she turns to the peasant for sympathy in the strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes from being swept away and revealing himself. The peasant's courage towards two armed men is striking, as well as his courtesy and his ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides

... There is no distortion or perversion in this choice and use of his instrument, any more than in Fielding's adaptation of the method of Joseph Andrews to the matter of the Voyage to Lisbon. In the first place, the imaginative form of narrative obliges the author to take his subject seriously and treat it ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker



Words linked to "Distortion" :   warp, contortion, optical aberration, misrepresentation, knot, form, warping, optical phenomenon, distort, harm, overrefinement, tortuosity, crookedness, gnarl, torsion, buckle, shape, mistake, falsification, error, chromatic aberration, impairment, fault, amplitude distortion, tortuousness, damage, electrical phenomenon, acoustic phenomenon, spherical aberration



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