"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flicker of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him, as if he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward a pace or two, stopped, and said, "Dinna be frichtit, mem. I'm come. Sen' the lassie hame an' du wi' me as ye like. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... frightened the boy. The shrivelled voice of the heath did not alarm him, for that was familiar. The thorn-bushes which arose in his path from time to time were less satisfactory, for they whistled gloomily, and had a ghastly habit after dark of putting on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous cripples. Lights were not uncommon this evening, but the nature of all of them was different from this. Discretion rather than terror prompted the boy to turn back instead of passing the light, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... ghastly! When man, sorrowful, Firstly, lastly, Of to-morrow full, After tarrying, Yields to harrying— ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... head against his shoulder, loosened her coat about her throat, and chafed her cold hands, drawing the robes closely about her slender shoulders, but she lay there white and without a sign, of life. He thought he never had seen anything so ghastly white as her face. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... did not see one. The bigness of this slope impressed me. We rode miles and miles, and every park was surrounded by heavy timber. At length we got into a burned district where the tall dead spruces stood sear and ghastly, and the ground was so thickly strewn with fallen trees that we had difficulty in threading a way through them. Patches of aspen grew on the hillside, still fresh and green despite this frosty morning. Here we found a sego lily, one of the most beautiful of flowers. Here also ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... instant to a fiery red, and then turns ghastly pale, and without a word he is going on his way, but Claverhouse will ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly. ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... said Dr. Townsend, noticing the ghastly pallor of Paul's face. "He is a very sick boy, and if I had not been called I would not have answered for the consequences. How do you feel, my boy?" he ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... would be enough to send Aunty into conniption fits—she actually told her, very quietly, to take them off, and dress according to her habits and her station? And you remember that in her big, square bedroom there is a praying-stool and a ghastly crucifix, at least three feet long, in ivory and black, quite too human for anything? Well, when I offered to put them in the corridor, she said I 'needn't trouble'; that really she hadn't noticed them, and they would do very well where they were. You'd think she had been accustomed ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence—nay even in that ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... ancient courtier—surpassed in splendour every festival that had been heard of for years. De Bethune had hardly lost himself in slumber when he was startled by Beringen, who, on drawing his curtains in this dead hour of the night, presented such a ghastly visage that the faithful friend of Henry instantly imagined some personal disaster to his well-beloved sovereign. "Is the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... on Front Street, or even the temporary stagnation of trade, but when the Pacific Union Club disappeared in the raging furnace, and, like many of his old cronies who had no home either in the country or out in the Western Addition, he was driven over to Oakland for lodgings, this ghastly climax of horrors—he escaped in a milk wagon after sleeping for two nights without shelter on the bare hills behind San Francisco, while the fire roared its defiance to the futile detonations of dynamite, and his sciatica was as fiery as the atmosphere—had broken the old man's ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hunter force a passage; With his mittens and his snow-shoes Vainly walked he through the forest, Sought for bird or beast and found none, Saw no track of deer or rabbit, In the snow beheld no footprints, In the ghastly, gleaming forest Fell, and could not rise from weakness, Perished there ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... which I had left it in joy and hope. After I had knocked, and was answered, my landlady almost fainted at the sight of me. She had believed me dead; and my appearance was not calculated to do away the impression, I looked so ghastly from anxiety and the want of sleep. Her joy was extreme when she found her mistake. I undressed and threw myself on my bed, where I soon fell into a sound sleep, the first I had enjoyed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... paint to you the heinousness of this crime: you have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the dreadful sentence of death does not shock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... whence the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... bought land, mortgages, farms, speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses, and various other things, paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable for the rest—at ten days. Presently the sober second thought came, and Halliday noticed that a ghastly anxiety was beginning to show up in a good many faces. Again he was puzzled, and didn't know what to make of it. "The Wilcox kittens aren't dead, for they weren't born; nobody's broken a leg; there's no shrinkage in mother-in-laws; nothing has ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... is easily trapped as she rushes into the house hearing her mother's cries for help. Soon after a Trojan menial drops from the first story. He tells how Helen and Hermione have so far escaped death, but the rest is unknown to him. In a ghastly scene Orestes hunts the wretch over the stage, but finally lets him go as he is not a fit victim for a free man's sword. Almost immediately the house is seen to be ablaze; Menelaus rushes up in a frenzy, but is checked by the sight of Orestes ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... suspicion that there might be a joke at the bottom of it all. He therefore commenced searching for an opening, but had not proceeded far when a faint gleam of light flashed through a crevice near the entrance, and, to his horror, discovered rows of rude coffins, standing upright, but with the ghastly faces of their inmates exposed, and made more unnatural by a pale glow of light playing over them. "Protect me, O father, protect me, for I am but a weak sinner, at thy mercy," he muttered, and fell upon ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was courage; and he would make haste to reassure them in a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... My back was stiff and my arms and legs grew cold. And yet I nor wished nor meant to stir: that was settled in my head. In the end, it became unbearable: I drew in my right leg, shifted my arm and carefully opened my eyes. 'Twas so ghastly, oh, so frightfully dark and warm: I could see the warm darkness; so funny, that steep, slanting tiled roof, crossed by black rafters, beams and laths, and all that space beyond, which disappeared in the dark ridgework: 'twas like a deserted, haunted booth at a fair, ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... of books and papers, Lovel was seated on a couch, in his night-gown and slippers. Oldbuck was shocked at the change which had taken place in his personal appearance. His cheek and brow had assumed a ghastly white, except where a round bright spot of hectic red formed a strong and painful contrast, totally different from the general cast of hale and hardy complexion which had formerly overspread and somewhat embrowned his countenance. Oldbuck observed, that the dress he wore belonged to a deep mourning ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with horror of me, if I confess it. Look at me! look at me!" he said, lifting his ghastly hands in despair to ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... do it! It's nasty, horrid, rough, heavy work, only fit for men, and not for our poor little fingers. We had just succeeded, with immense labour, in fastening it all round when we made the cheerful discovery that a boxful of nails are scattered over the floor beneath. You came in at the ghastly moment when it had dawned upon us that it had all to come ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... might the better attend to him. We then went to assist my uncle in looking after the other wounded men. Two were unfit for duty, but the rest managed to get about with bandaged arms and heads, and a somewhat ghastly crew they looked. The second mate and boatswain were slightly hurt, and Blyth had received two wounds, but neither were of much consequence; while the captain, though three bullets had gone through his clothes, was uninjured, as were the first mate and I. ...
— The Mate of the Lily - Notes from Harry Musgrave's Log Book • W. H. G. Kingston
... nurse and physician. One sunny afternoon she looped back the white curtains, and sat down before the open window. Harriet had dressed her in a blue calico wrapper, which made her wan face still more ghastly, and the folds of black hair, which the gentle fingers of the kind nurse had disentangled, lay thick about her forehead, like an ebon wreath on the brow of a statue. Her elbows rested on the arms of the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... looking towards him through the door; the tears standing thick in her eyes, the color gone from her cheeks, the yearning pulses of grief and pity beating faster and faster in her heart. Ah! how pale and wan and piteously still he lay there, with the ghastly white bandages round his head, and one helpless, languid hand hanging over the bedside! How changed from that glorious creature, all youth, health, strength, and exulting activity, whom it had so long been her innocent idolatry to worship in secret! How fearfully ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... been no events this week that I know of, except his Grace of Bedford's(51) appearance at Court. His eyes are a ghastly object. He seems blind himself, and makes every [one] else so that looks at him. They have no speculation in them, as Shakespear says; what should be white is red, and there is no sight or crystal, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... parties. To say nothing of Rogers' fame, his wealth, his position in society, those who know what his cynicism and his worldliness were, will understand what such an effort, physical and moral, must have cost him. He always looked like a death's head, but his ghastly pallor, after that Alpine ascent, made me feel as if he had come ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... he asked, "that you believe one word of all this ghastly rubbish? I mean as to that antique charlatan being a thousand years old and having caused the Flood and ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... captured waggon. They are all fresh and gory—hang limber along the shaft. The blood is not yet dry upon them—the wet surface glitters in the sun! We view them with singular emotions—mine perhaps more singular than any. I endeavour to identify some of those ghastly trophies. I am but too ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still and quiet, even the occasional tremors ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... killed during the last three days has excited much less interest in my feelings than the death of this poor youth. I cannot picture to my mind's eye any other distinct image among the slain. They present only a ghastly mass, with all the revolting accompaniments of gaping wounds and blood-stained garments, I never saw them in life,—knew not the faces that will be steeped in tears, or convulsed in agony at their deaths; but this ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... standing near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on many a starlight night, for he has cherished an idea for many centuries that if he could only enter there, he could rest. But when he approaches, the doors slam to with a crash, the earth trembles, and all the lights in Jerusalem burn a ghastly blue! He does this every fifty years, just the same. It is hopeless, but then it is hard to break habits one has been eighteen hundred years accustomed to. The old tourist is far away on his wanderings, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seemed to say, "who lost Jeremy's dog and broke Jeremy's heart." She was sure that someone was beneath her bed. That old terror haunted her with an almost humorous persistency every night before she went to sleep, but to-night there was a ghastly certainty and imminence about it that froze her blood. She crouched up against the hanging skirts, gazing at the black line between the floor and the white sheets, expecting at every second to see a protruding black mask, bloodshot eyes, a coarse hand. The memory of the burglary that they ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... semi-darkness a noisy battle raged. After some minutes the Lirongs drew off and rushed back to their boats as wildly as they had come; and, strange to say, no blood was flowing, no heads were rolling on the ground, no ghastly wounds were gaping, in fact no one seemed any the worse. For it seems that this attack was merely a well understood formality, a put-up job, so to say. When two tribes, between whom there is a blood-feud not formally settled, meet together ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... place was still marked with all the horrors of last week's battle. Then, as usual, disease and famine followed upon war. Not a house was without a funeral. Death was everywhere to be seen in its most ghastly form. Bodies were left un-buried in the streets to be eaten by the dogs. Men ran away from their sickening friends in fear. As the sun set they felt in doubt whether they should be alive to see it rise in the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... ranged groups of haggard men, with tattered clothes and dulled or tigerish eyes, some dignified, some broken down by grief; while here and there newly fallen corpses, and in one hideous corner a great heap of abandoned dead, should point the ghastly words of Thucydides: [Greek: ton nekron ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... would have no congeniality with his wicked thoughts, but this throttling and strangling has. There is always before him, an ugly, bloody, scarecrow phantom, that champions her, as it were, and yet shows him, in a ghastly way, the example of murder. Is she very weak, or very trustful in him, or infirm, or old? It gives a hideous courage to what would be mere slaughter otherwise; for there it is, a presence always about her, darkly menacing him with that penalty whose murky secret ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... temple and an obsequious "Yes, Ma'am," any romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... the Hotel, but Natalie now became seriously alarmed; and well she might. His complexion looked ghastly, his limbs shook, and his features bore an expression of indescribable horror and anguish. What could be the meaning of so extraordinary a change in the gay, witty, prosperous De Chaulieu, who, till that morning, seemed not to ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... with vermin; the rotten floors, ceilings begrimed, crumbling, ofttimes too low to permit you to stand upright, and windows stuffed with rags; or why try to portray the gaunt shivering forms and wild ghastly faces in these black and beetling abodes, wherein ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... yells and hurrahs. The second corps fell back behind the guns to allow the use of grape and double canister, and as it tore through the rebel ranks at only a few paces distant the dead and wounded were piled in ghastly heaps. Still on they came up to the very muzzles of the guns; they were blown away from the cannon's mouth but yet they did not waver. Pickett had taken the key to the position and the glad shout of victory ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... but Coutlass had his and was on the track ahead of us, his eye a ghastly sight from the guard's overnight attentions, his face the gruesome color of the man who has eaten and drunk too much, but his undamaged eye ablaze, and nothing whatever the matter ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... with a laugh so inconceivably devilish that his own lawyer, even, recoiled at the sound. "Ha, ha!" he repeated, with a smile on his lips, made ghastly by the fires of concentrated malice that shot from his eyes. "Wouldn't my good friends, here, like to try this ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... I cannot see. Oh, my God!" His staring eyes saw something invisible to the others; his hands plucked continually at the counterpane. Suddenly he shuddered and gasped: "The cemetery—me—my God!" He did not speak again. He lay there motionless and ghastly. The hours dragged on; the clock of a neighboring convent ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... recoiled. The face was seared with livid scars, the nose crushed to one side, the mouth crooked and set in a sneering grin. One eye was nearly closed and the other round and wide open. A more forbidding and ghastly countenance Mr. Merrick had never beheld and in his surprise he muttered ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... in the cockpit, half hanging from the side. He was motionless, quiet, and his face shone white and ghastly as they released him and drew him out. But one hand still clung with a grip like death itself to a hose that led from an oxygen tank. McGuire stared in wonder and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... and mountain to Kanas, at the head of the beautiful lake of Tondano, hitherto seen in glimpses at an immense depth between encircling peaks. Wearied almost to stupefaction by eleven hours of a combat, after which victory seems scarcely less ghastly than defeat, we would gladly remain for the night at the little Rest House of Kanas, but prudence compels us to push on to Tondano, at the other end of the lake, while a capable pony remains at disposal. The lake road is a vista ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... only, all men, were recovered. It was strange to me how I got used to it. The first horror over, the cry that yet another body had come awoke only a gentle pity—no more dismay or shuddering. But, finding I could be of no use, I did not wait longer than just till the morning began to dawn with a pale ghastly light over the seething raging sea; for the sea raged on, although the wind had gone down. There were many strong men about, with two surgeons and all the coastguard, who were well accustomed to similar though not such extensive destruction. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Kelly, an old junk dealer, picked up the mutilated corpse of a well-dressed man in the East river off the foot of East Forty-second street. He towed it behind his skiff to the morgue, and turned the corpse over to the authorities, with an account of his ghastly find. The body had been in the water so long it would have been unrecognizable if it were not for some private papers found in the pockets, by means of which the man's identity was established. A reporter was the first one to bring the news to the ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... his remark; it seemed unnecessary, and each was busy with his own thoughts. What did the next few days hold in store for the world, for England, for him? The ghastly, haunting fear that possibly they held nothing for England gnawed at men's hearts. It would be incredible, inconceivable; but impossible things had happened before. Many must have felt that fear, but to none can it have been quite so personal, so hideously ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... (q.v.). In 1814 she went to the Continent with P.B. Shelley (q.v.), and m. him two years later. When abroad she saw much of Byron, and it was at his villa on the Lake of Geneva that she conceived the idea of her famous novel of Frankenstein (1818), a ghastly but powerful work. None of her other novels, including The Last Man and Lodore, had the same success. She contributed biographies of foreign artists and authors to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and ed. her ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... worse, many of them have become mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on you with its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life,—some generation-and-half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to reappear, and bless us, or our ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... hoarse plunge, and a piercing cry rushed up from that break in the ice, a cry that cut through the air sharper than an arrow, piercing far and wide through the cold night! Then the moon came out, and revealed a ghastly face low down in the blackness, and two hands grasping the ragged edges of the ice, slipping away—clutching out again, and still again, so fiercely, that drops of blood fell after them into the dark current beneath. Still the white face struggled upward ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... while she walked again to the bed and sat upon it, staring out into the flood of moonlight, her face ghastly, her hands hanging limply at ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... drops of sweat stood upon her forehead, yet she would not now have left the room without penetrating into the mystery of death. Miss Thusa laid her hand upon the sheet and turned it back from the pale and ghastly face, on whose brow the mysterious signet of everlasting rest was set. Still, immovable, solemn, placid—it lay beneath the gaze, with shrouded eye, and cheek like concave marble, and hueless, waxen lips. What depth, what grandeur, what duration in that repose! What ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... announcement was to be made to them formally, a little later. And now it was Louisa who was making the announcement, brutally, coarsely. The outrage of the episode was a hundredfold intensified; it grew into an inconceivable ghastly horror. Hilda's self-respect seemed to have a physical body and Louisa to be hacking at it with a ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... mountain winds, were mournfully chanting the dirge of the year, that strange wailing hymn with which they accompany the shock of the tempest and the swift rush of the grey clouds charged with snow and hail, while the pale moon lights up the grim and ghastly battle scene. ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. She remembered Gow the pirate, who had been a native of these islands, in which he closed his career. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... complete. All around us lay the dunes, monstrous as still leviathans. Here and there, between their strange, suggestive shapes, under the dark sky one could see the ghastly whiteness of the saltpetre in the arid plains beyond, where the low bushes bent in the chilly breeze. I thought of London—only a few days' journey from me—revelled for a moment in my situation, which, contrary to my expectation, was rather emphasised by the presence of my companions. ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... seated on the surrounding trees devouring the pieces they had carried off, while several hyenas, already gorged, crept sulkily away, doubting whether they should attack us or not. The spectacle was almost ghastly, and it showed how soon a mountain of flesh might disappear in that region. Chickango was greatly disappointed, as not a particle of flesh which he could touch remained, while, of course, we regretted the loss of the valuable tusks. On our way back, we caught sight of a number of beautiful ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... their heads to avoid each other's eyes, the former making a desperate effort at self-control as she gazed severely through a window near her. It was not funny, this thing, she reminded herself sternly; it was too ghastly to be funny, but there was no question that the selection of Ivan Ivanovitch as the joyous, all-pervasive sunbeam of the community at Locust Hall was slightly incongruous. When she could trust herself she glanced at him. He stood as he had stood ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... the ship moved on, Yet never a breeze up blew; The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew." ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... for interests of the human race felt even where they are not understood; so that the tutelary angel of man, when he traverses such a dreadful field, when he reads the distorted features, counts the ghastly ruins, sums the hidden anguish, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... other. Sudden thrills, As of two lovers reading the same book, Ran through our hurried grasp. But when we turned, The scene around was smitten with a change: The lamps with lurid fire-light flared and burned; And through the wreaths and flowers,—oh, mockery strange!— The prison-walls with ghastly horror frowned; Scarce hidden by vine-leaves and clusters thick, A grim cold iron grating closed around. Then from our silken couches leaping quick, We hurried past the dancers and the lights, Nor heeded the entrancing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... deputy, in the task of superintending Francois' preparations in the Rue Fortunee. No doubt Francois worked strenuously, as he, like all Balzac's servants, was devoted to his master, though on this occasion he unwittingly provided him with a ghastly home-coming. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... this be true?" as she speaks, stretching her arms up to the inanimate form, still in the saddle—for it is fast tied there—and throwing them around it; then with one hand lifting off the hat, which falls from her trembling fingers, she gazes on a ghastly face, and into eyes that return not her gaze. But for an instant, when, with a wild cry, she sinks back upon the earth, and lies silent, motionless, the moonbeams shimmering upon her cheeks, showing them white and bloodless, as if her last spark of ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... found a pitiful wreck. Gordon was cold sober, and it was as if all his vital fluid had evaporated. His face was ghastly, his nerves utterly out of control, and his tongue stumbled as though it were hung by the middle with both ends at odds. Yet for all his shocking physical condition, something in the wastrel Englishman appealed to ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... arms, which began to beat the water wildly—the head turned back, and gave the face to the light. The mouth gaping wide; the eyes open, but sightless, and the bloodless pallor of a drowning man—never anything more ghastly! Yet he gave a cry of joy at the sight, and as the face was going under again, he caught the sufferer by the chain which passed from the helmet beneath the chin, and drew ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... something like that which seems to play about the long, slit lips of a dead viper. This unpleasant combination of features was terminated by a short but prominent chin, indicating a determined and undeviating will. The ghastly yellow color of her face made the unnatural brightness of her beady eyes more ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... A ghastly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door. Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch and crossed the room towards the window. He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might calm a little. Then he turned and leaned against a chest ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... wonderful unconsciousness of childhood. The difficult hour was nearly over before sounds of the affair below first began to be audible to them. But at the first, muffled scream of laughter, Madame Gregoriev started, violently, all the color flying from her face, and a ghastly pallor taking its place. The Countess Dravikine, after one instant of puzzled consideration, leaned forward, and began a hastily animated conversation with her nephew, upon all sorts of boyish affairs. Fortunately the effort was needed only for ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... at breakfast looking so ghastly that Portlaw became alarmed. It seemed to be rather late for that; Hamil's face was already turning a dreadful bluish white under his host's astonished gaze, and as the first chill seized him he rose ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... middle, like a girl's, and, combed out straight, fell down to his shoulders on either side. All this care and neatness of dress made the contrast of his face stand out the more strikingly. Its pallor was ghastly: no other word conveys the idea of it. His lips kept asunder, as we see them sometimes in persons prostrated by long illness, and the nether one quivered incessantly, as did the smaller facial muscles near the mouth. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by livid circles, but they themselves ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... incandescent vapor of mercury is its paucity of spectral colors. Its visible spectrum consists chiefly of violet, blue, green, and yellow rays. It emits virtually no red rays, and, therefore, red objects appear devoid of red. The human face appears ghastly under this light and it distorts colors in general. However, it possesses the advantages of high efficiency, of reasonably low brightness, of high actinic value, and of revealing detail clearly. Various attempts ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... far too much, but for the soldiers. I want something that will bring in a big sum. It occurs to me that if a lot of us got up a story and acted it ourselves, it would be tremendously interesting to—well, to ourselves. And our friends would flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly from an artistic standpoint, but ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... facts," answered Denman. "The training makes a man of a bad boy, and a gentleman of a good one. What a ghastly pity that, because of conservatism and politics, all this splendid material for officers should go to waste, and the appointments to Annapolis be given to good high-school scholars, who might be cowardly sissies at ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... bushes on the opposite shore move, and a face, painted and ghastly, was thrust out. Others followed, a half-dozen altogether, and Henry saw them surveying the river and examining his own shore. The muzzle of his rifle moved forward a few inches more, but he knew that it would ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the law. As a family lawyer he was the soul of discretion, an excellent fighter, wary and reticent, deep as the grave, but far safer. The grave sometimes opens and divulges a ghastly secret from its narrow depths. There was no chance of getting anything out of Mr. Brimsdown, dead or alive. He had no wife to extract bedroom confidences from him, no relations to visit in expansive moments, he trusted nothing to paper or diary, and he did not ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... resurrection of human beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by, as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud, ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from on high with ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... swift to west The ghastly war-flame spread; High on St. Michael's Mount it shone, It shone on Beachy Head. Far on the deep the Spaniards saw Along each southern shire Cape beyond cape, in endless range Those twinkling ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... man's face. Perhaps I knew him. At least I could set my foot upon it, and say, 'Vanquished as I am, there lies a foe!' I caught hold of the rivets, and tore his helmet off. The moon shone bright, senors, as bright as she shines now—the glaring, ghastly, tell-tale moon, which shows man all the sins which he tries to hide; and by that moonlight, senors, I beheld the dead man's face. And it was the face of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... head. The woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... it,' said Vea, her face becoming ghastly pale. 'Do look out again, Lily dear, and see if Alfred is ...
— Bluff Crag - or, A Good Word Costs Nothing • Mrs. George Cupples
... I, calmly and very gently, for I had a ghastly dread that she would fall before my very eyes. "Don't look down: just keep your eyes fixed on the rock, and hold on tight until I reach you." She obeyed me. "Now," I went on authoritatively, "drop the dog—drop him, I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... intended to relate in detail the progress and incidents of that ghastly contest—a contest without vicissitudes, its alternations only different degrees of despair. Almost at the instant when Captain Coulter's gun blew its challenging cloud twelve answering clouds rolled upward from among the trees about the plantation house, a deep multiple report roared ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... were made to take part in the fight, striking down the foe with their lashing forelegs. The waters grew more and more polluted; but new myriads came up momentarily and plunged in, heedless of everything but thirst. Such a spectacle of revengeful passion, ghastly fear, the frenzy of hatred, mortal conflict, convulsion and despair as fell on the eyes of the approaching horsemen has rarely been seen, and that quiet mountain lake, which perhaps had never before vibrated with the sounds ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... hear you," for at that instant I took not the slightest interest in any lady on the earth. Fiercely I glared at Marut and noted even then how pitiful was his countenance. There was no smile there now. All its jovial roundness had vanished. It had sunk in; it was blue and ghastly with large, protruding eyes, like to that of a man who had ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... doubtful and frightened. I suppose there was something in my looks or manner that alarmed her; but she would not go, and that literally saved me. You had no idea, sir, that a living man could be made so abject a slave of Satan," he said, with a ghastly groan and ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... operation of curiosity and fear; while the organist, intent only on his performance, and spreading all his fingers to strike a swell of magnificent chords, felt his harmonic spirit ready to desert his body on being answered by the ghastly rattle of empty keys, and in the consequent agitato furioso of the internal movements of his feelings, was preparing to restore harmony by the segue subito of an appoggiatura con foco with the corner of a book ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... threw a ghastly livid hue on the strongly-marked features of the sleeper, rendered sharp and haggard by disease and his penurious habits; she could just distinguish through the gloom the spectre-like form of the invalid, and the long bony attenuated hands which grasped, from time to time, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... I cried, at the top of my voice. The crazy engineer started, and caught the pistol in his hand. Oh, how those great black eyes glared, and how ghastly and ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... rolled on with them a long time without a word being said. Mr. Carleton knew that she was not weeping nor faint. But as the light of the lamps was now and then cast within the carriage he saw that her face looked ghastly; and he saw too that its expression was not of a quiet sinking under sorrow, nor of an endeavour to bear up against it, but a wild searching gaze into the darkness of possibilities. They had near reached ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... with a shudder, for the dead man's face was ghastly to behold. Then turning to him as if nothing had ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... never before had she felt (and she, had felt it always) for the whole order of things for which it stood. She felt her very blood run acid, causing her to twist, in her acid contempt for the subservience of women, and most of all for that Laetitia's subservience, floated on that ghastly coquetry like a shifting cargo that in the first gale will capsize the ship; she felt her very temples throb, and almost thought they must be heard, in her fierce detestation of all the masculinity of men and most of all—yes, with a flash of eye she ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... of that most hideous snake 305 Enwrapped round, oft faining to retire And oft him to assaile, he fiercely strake Whereas his temples did his creast front tyre*; And, for he was but slowe, did slowth off shake, And, gazing ghastly on, (for feare and yre 310 Had blent** so much his sense, that lesse he feard,)— Yet, when he saw him slaine, himselfe he cheard. [* Tyre, encircle] ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... upon her, and implored she would be his wife. After a thousand faint denials, she told him she could not possibly receive that honour, but if she could, she would have looked upon it as a great favour from heaven; at that he was thunder-struck, and looked as ghastly as if his mother's ghost had frightened him; and after much debate, love and grief on his side, design and dissimulation on hers, she gave him hopes that atoned for all she had before said; insomuch that, before they parted, an absolute bargain was struck up, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... day or two. Notwithstanding his critical position, he was lively and cheerful, and when I gave him a small piece of silver was as overjoyed as if he had got news of his reprieve. Jumping away, his clanking fetters making ghastly music, he gleefully showed to his guard the coin that would probably procure him food the few days he had to live. His wretched appearance, impending fate, and shocking levity had chased away the peaceful feelings with which I had watched the quiet sunset; but as he hobbled off, night, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then filled ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... A ghastly hour moves on, dragging its regiment of panic in its trail and leaving crimson blotches of cruelty ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... said the Colonel; and the apothecary thought there was something ghastly in his look and tone. "Why, 't is ten year, you old fool; and do you think a man with a treasure like that in his possession would ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bands of fierce musquittos boom Their threatening bugles round the room, To bed! Ere wingless creatures crawl Across your path from yonder wall, And slipper'd feet unheeding tread We know not what! To bed! to bed! What can those horrid sounds portend? Some waylaid traveller near his end, From ghastly gash in mortal strife, Or blow of bandit's blood-stained knife? No! no! They're bawling to the Virgin, Like victim under hands of surgeon! From lamp-lit daub, proceeds the cry Of that unearthly litany! And now a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... mirth of that grinning multitude. I shook my clenched, up-stretched fists against them. And when at last their ghastly merriment ceased, I raised my ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... dream in the soft, warm sunshine... they are happy, they are care-free, their whole life is a song. And they are trusting, hospitable... the wonderful white strangers come, and they take them into their homes, and open their hearts to them. And the strangers go away and leave them a ghastly disease, that rages like a fire in their palm-thatched cabins, that sweeps through their villages like a tornado. And the women's hair falls out... they wither up... they're old hags in a year or two. And the babies... ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... gaping towards me, and into me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before. They had lines of fire along the sides of them as though they had been outlined with a luminous pencil. And there was a ghastly thing swimming backwards with a lot of twining arms. And then I saw, coming very slowly towards me through the gloom, a hazy mass of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer into multitudes of fishes, struggling and darting round something that drifted. I drove on straight towards it, and ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... any want he might express, and to administer what comfort I could do him in his dying moments; for that he was dying, notwithstanding the temporary revival alluded to, was but too evident from his ghastly look ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... feet of bare black rock on one side, an equal height covered with solemn cedars on the other, an unfathomed torrent roaring between them, the fresh remembrance of the ghastly legend belonging to the spot, and the idea of my children clinging to the dizzy path I had left, was altogether sombre enough; but I had not sat long before a tremendous burst of thunder shook the air; the ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... famous exordium with extreme care, and I have sought diligently in the works of all the great modern orators, and of some of the ancient as well, for similar passages of higher merit. My quest has been in vain. Mr. Webster's description of the White murder, and of the ghastly haunting sense of guilt which pursued the assassin, has never been surpassed in dramatic force by any speaker, whether in debate or before a jury. Perhaps the most celebrated descriptive passage in the literature of modern eloquence ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... knowing she had made the most ghastly mistake, and not knowing how to remedy it. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... mutual avowal of affection. Apparently it now awakened very different recollections. Bertram's brow, when he had looked round the spot, became gloomy and embarrassed. Meg, after uttering to herself, "This is the very spot!" looked at him with a ghastly side-glance,—"D'ye mind it?" ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... from the stupor into which he was plunged. He rested his hands upon his knees, and his eyes were riveted to something that lay, at the distance of a few feet before him, on the floor. A second glance was sufficient to inform me of what nature this object was. It was the body of a man, bleeding, ghastly, and still exhibiting the marks of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... number of ruffians from the adjoining Comtat Venaissin. This was early in February, 1571. Now began a scene of rapine and bloodshed that might demand detailed mention, were it not that at the frequent repetition of such ghastly recitals the stoutest heart sickens. Men, and even mere boys, of the reformed faith were butchered in their homes, in the arms of their wives or their mothers. The goods of Protestants were plundered and openly sold to the highest bidder. Of many, a ransom was ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... an hour they returned, bringing with them a keen-eyed, tall young man, who had a number of tools wrapped in an apron. Evidently he was unused to such scenes, for he became deathly pale upon seeing the ghastly spectacle on my bed. With staring eyes and open mouth he began to retreat towards the ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... appearance was natural enough; and, judging by a plaster cast of him, which I purchased in London, I should say mean, as regarded his facial structure. One fact, however, was striking, and fell in with the impression of his natural tiger character, that his face wore at all times a bloodless ghastly pallor. 'You might imagine,' said my informant, 'that in his veins circulated not red life- blood, such as could kindle into the blush of shame, of wrath, of pity— but a green sap that welled from no human heart.' His eyes seemed frozen and glazed, as if their light were all ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards planted ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a certain day, that as the inhuman Barbarico was prowling along the side of a craggy mountain overgrown with brambles and briery thickets, taking most horrid strides, rolling his ghastly eyes around in quest of human blood, and having his breast tortured with inward rage and grief, that he had been so unhappy as to live one whole day without some act of violence, he beheld, in a pleasant valley at a distance, a little rivulet winding its gentle course ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... begins, and on it there were ugly iron spikes; and sometimes the heads of those who had been executed were stuck on these spikes, and stayed there until they rotted away. All the people passing along the street could look up and see the heads, and sometimes, when the wind was high, a ghastly head came tumbling down into the street. We cannot think of such things without horror; but in those days people were accustomed to them, and did not mind them very much. When Mary came to Temple Bar she asked for ink and paper, and wrote there the order for young Lady Jane and ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... home the more portable creatures in his pockets, and transferring them to his mother for immediate care. I have heard him speak admiringly of the skilful tenderness with which she took into her lap a lacerated cat, washed and sewed up its ghastly wound, and nursed it back to health. The great intimacy with the life and habits of animals which reveals itself in his works is readily explained ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his hands over his forehead, and tried to think, but it was of no use. Everything was vague, broken, crushed, and shapeless. Faces seemed to rise to his disturbed sight, and he wondered whether he had ever known these people; a ghastly weariness as of death was upon him, and his arms fell heavily by his sides. He groaned aloud, and if in that bitter sigh he could have breathed away his existence he ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... her for a while until I heard a distant clock strike three. This recalled me to the dangers of our situation. I struck a match and lit the gas in the bedroom. But the yellow glare was so ghastly and intolerable that I turned ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... a mourning of black pansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dared to break The power that held a race in chains, I see the ghastly lynching-stake, Where brutal mobs their vengeance take, And, since no law their course restrains, Gloat ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves cast ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... never want a skull to grin ghastly lessons of morality at me, while I have you," replied Helen, with a ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James |
