"Grotesquely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... improve. It is always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses—the painted surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... in the republic of Mexico. Among the numberless churches, a curious one will long be remembered, namely, the Santa Vera Cruz, the facade of which very much resembles that of a dime museum, having a lot of grotesquely-colored figures ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... conductors, and even amongst city scavengers. Lightning strikes without any notice are of growing frequency. Some are short-lived, others very obstinate, dragging on for weeks and months. Some are grotesquely frivolous, others by no means lack justification or excuse. Intimidation often not unaccompanied by violent assaults on non-strikers is an ugly feature common to most of them. They sometimes lead to very serious riots and bloodshed. ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... And then, grotesquely, preluded by a cry from the woman, the tragedy which death had once cut short was enacted out, there on the rough sheet ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie {218} Brewed a Peck o' Maut, but the headlong fun of Tam O'Shanter, and the visions, grotesquely terrible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars. Cowper had celebrated "the cup which cheers but not inebriates." Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink. Cowper was a stranger to Burns's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... an historian of the eighteenth century, however, few things can be more grotesquely absurd than to suppose that the merits or demerits, the failure or the successes of the Irish Parliament has any real bearing on modern schemes for reconstructing the Government of Ireland on a revolutionary ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... off his coat, and expressed himself ready and willing to tempt fate in her place. Ellen brought him one of her dust-caps, and went into contortions of mirth, which she found it impossible to control, when she saw him put it on before the mirror as grotesquely as he could. Edna herself could not refrain from smiling when she fastened it at his request. So it was he who in turn mounted the ladder, unhooking pictures and curtains, and dislodging ornaments as Edna directed. When he had ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... fame. It is useless to try and copy some one else's greatness; that is like trying to look like some one else's portrait, even if it be a portrait by Velasquez. Not that modesty is inseparable from greatness; there are abundance of great men who have been childishly and grotesquely vain; but in such cases it has been a greatness of performance, a marvellous faculty, not a greatness of soul. Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency which it indicates. He adds that a man who underrates himself is justly undervalued ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to portray some noticeable characteristics in Lela and Majoli, how are Celina and Guerrabella occupied? You see Guerrabella has a pencil in her hand. She is sketching a head; if we look closely, we shall probably recognize our own, grotesquely drawn, for there is no denying that our young genius is fond of caricaturing her friends. Celina sits by a table; her large, open eyes have a distant, dreamy expression. Her pen moves rapidly across ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... days together; and after having headed a noisy procession, decorated with bonnet rouge and one of those antique camloteen cloaks which our forefathers used to rejoice in, it would be found in the morning grotesquely propped up, either in the centre of the old Upper Town market, or in the old Picote cemetery in Couillard street [347], in that fanciful costume (a three-storied sombrero, with eye-glass and dudeen) which rendered so piquant some of the former ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... and salubrity, its cold dulness and dim brightness, were there before him. Meanwhile within him strange things took place. It was literally true that his impression began again, after a lull, to make him nervous and anxious, and for reasons peculiarly confused, almost grotesquely mingled, or at least comically sharp. He was distinctly an agitation and a new taste—that he could see; and he saw quite as much therefore the excitement she already drew from the vision of Addie, an image intensified ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... and trees. In this one instance, however, the tree agent evidently found a customer who was persuaded that if one Kilmarnock willow was a good thing to have, a dozen of them was twelve times better; wherefore his dooryard is grotesquely adorned with that many flourishing weepers, giving an aspect that is anything but decorous or solemn. Some time the vigilance of the citizen will be relaxed, it may be hoped; he will neglect to cut away the recurring shoots of the parent trees, and they will escape and destroy the weeping ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... shadow on the horizon, the light from the crater shedding a lurid glare upon the surrounding gloom. In time the glow of the burning lava, reflected in the icy mirror, fell upon the troop of skaters, and cast their lengthened shadows grotesquely on the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... well and happy, and they send loves to you by the bushel. We are in the agonies of house-hunting. The people are frightfully civil, and grotesquely extortionate. One man (with a house to let) told me yesterday that he loved the Duke of Wellington like a brother. The same gentleman wanted to hug me round the neck with one hand, and pick my pocket ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... the elderly man struggled to release his arm from the grip of a wedging timber. The body of the porter, doubled grotesquely, partially protruded from under ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... of seven green men, even hands and faces are green; they wear greenstone sandals, they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries, their right arms and right forefingers point upwards, right elbows resting on left hands: they stoop grotesquely: halfway to the footlights they wheel left. They pass in front of the seven beggars, now in terrified attitudes and six of them sit down in the attitude described, with their backs to the audience. The leader stands, still stooping. ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... familiar with the pictures of the famous statesman, but the man himself was very different from his representation. He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat, with his watch-chain gleaming through its fringe. Such was the stately presence who looked stonily at ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some citizen on a tour of inspection of his cabin roof-tree, where some of his goods were still stored. There was no sense of terror in this bland obliteration of the little settlement; the ruins of a single burnt-up cabin would have been more impressive than this stupid and even grotesquely placid effect of the rival destroying element. People took it naturally; the water went as it had come,—slowly, impassively, noiselessly; a few days of fervid Californian sunshine dried the cabins, and in a week or two the red dust lay again as thickly before their ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Tyrcis must love him; whoever loves and is beloved by him, has indeed found happiness." Saint-Aignan here paused; he was enjoying the pleasure of all these compliments; and the portrait he had drawn, however grotesquely inflated it might be, had found favor in certain ears, in which the perfections of the shepherd did not seem to have been exaggerated. Madame begged the orator to continue. "Tyrcis," said the comte, "had a faithful ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... walls while trench-mortars were making a tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse—his comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and their boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools round their feet. They were unshaven, and their wet faces were smeared with the soil of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... same time Titian received from the brother of this princess, his patron and admirer Federigo Gonzaga, the commission for the famous series of the Twelve Caesars, now only known to the world by stray copies here and there, and by the grotesquely exaggerated engravings of AEgidius Sadeler. Giulio Romano having in 1536[20] completed the Sala di Troja in the Castello of Mantua, and made considerable progress with the apartments round about it, Federigo Gonzaga conceived the idea of devoting one whole room to the painted ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... needed at no matter what cost to himself, demanding nothing in return! For it had been a hard struggle to be constantly with the woman he loved and yet keep himself in hand. To Mallory, Rooke's return seemed grotesquely inopportune. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... projecting spout usually grotesquely carved and used to throw the water from the roof well away from ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... as she stumbled through the narrow hall-way into the kitchen. How dark it was! Her quick glance comprehended the whole scene, and the contrast between it and that other home-coming smote her with a keen sense of physical pain. She looked at the solitary lamp with its grotesquely hideous ornament of red flannel, at Susan's expressionless, freckled face, at the boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... of the Sixteenth Century. In the pottery villages the work is done mostly by men, who sit on the broad, shaded platform and shape their immense vessels in imitation of human beings and every imaginable animal shape. The grotesquely shaped mouth is generally intended for the opening, through which the water, soup or ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... tobacco and lighted his cigarette, one of the men addressed him directly. Purdy noticed that he was a squat man, and that the legs of his leather chaps bowed prodigiously. He was thick and wide of chest, a tuft of hair protruded grotesquely from a hole in the crown of his soft-brimmed hat, and a stubby beard masked his features except for a pair of beady, deep-set eyes that stared at Purdy across the glowing brands of the dying fire. He tossed his cigarette into the coals ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... his fibs, as a rule, made out of whole cloth. They usually had a basis of truth. When he told a story and he felt that it was producing no effect he would "play it up," as newspapermen would put it, often quite grotesquely. Altogether he was so inclined to overemphasize and embellish his facts that it was not always easy to say where truth ended and fiction began. Somehow it seemed to me as though the moistness and looseness of his lips had something to do ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the name of all that's damnably, of all that's grotesquely delusive, are we?" he said, without a sign, to himself; which was the form of his really being quite at sea as to what she was talking about. That uncertainty indeed he could but frankly betray by taking her up, as he cast about him, on the particular ambiguity that his voice perhaps already ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... night! Is it the splash of oars? No—for the two black slaves who guide yon boat which has shot out from the shore into the center of the gulf, are resting on the slight sculls—the boat itself, too, is now stationary—and not a ripple is stirred up by its grotesquely-shaped prow. What, then, was ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... from the German lines, and as the light made everything grotesquely visible, the outline of a building showed blackly fifty yards from the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Hall, a large building, now used for corporation council meetings, and festivities, erected in the reign of Henry VI., is one of the richest and most interesting vestiges of the ornamental architecture of England. The principal room has a grotesquely-carved roof of oak, a gallery for minstrels, an armoury, a chair of state, and a great painted window, which need only the filling up of royal and noble personages, their attendants, and the rich burgesses of Coventry, to recall the time when Richard ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... philosophers) pass as a partisan of socialism. It is strange, indeed, that anyone could have been able to make him believe that there is in Italy enough ignorance among writers as well as among readers for one to misuse so grotesquely the name of Herbert Spencer, whose extreme individualism is known ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... "it'll all wash off." She gave a convincing nod of her head and rubbed a hand ruefully across the grotesquely decorated cheek. "It's just cream and red-beet juice ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... him an almost grotesquely irrelevant, inadequate word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him, "She is a wonderful woman, loyal, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... threw his light cap at the baby's head; it landed grotesquely cocked over one eye, and the General, promptly sitting upon it to protect himself from further attacks, fell into convulsions of laughter as the ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... height, loosely knit and thin, with a cunning, brutal face. He had a bullet-shaped head, with fine, soft, reddish brown hair; a round, stubbly beard shot with gray; and small, beady eyes set close together. He was clothed in an old, black, grotesquely fitting cutaway coat, with coarse trousers tucked into his boot tops. A worn visored cloth cap was on his head. In his right hand he carried an old ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the stranger. We alone had witnessed this incident, and were watching him breathlessly. Yet what bade fair a moment ago to be a tragedy, seemed now to halt grotesquely. For Tournelli, throwing open his linen jacket with a melodramatic gesture, tapped his breast, and with flashing eyes and suppressed accents said, "Sare; you wantah ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... which it derives from the fact of its author's repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text—it is hardly possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of his action and the fierceness of his tone and gesture—a fierceness so grotesquely ill-attuned to his slender frame and clerkly attire left the company for a moment speechless with amazement. Then a mighty burst of laughter greeted him, above which sounded the shrill voice of Tyler, who held his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... jaws. There was no nose, only slanted holes like the nostrils of an animal; and over these were set pale, expressionless, pupil-less eyes. The arms were short and thick and ended in bifurcated lumps of flesh like swollen hands encased in old-fashioned mittens. The legs were also grotesquely short, and the feet mere ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the horrible creatures!" cried Aunt Georgie, who stood there full in the firelight in happy unconsciousness of the fact that the scene was double, for the shadows of the two performers were thrown grotesquely but distinctly upon the wall of verdure by ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... and playwrights. From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade less ridiculous, less grotesquely deserving of his fate, than the husband defrauded of his wife's affection. The plausible adulteress and the adroit seducer had a recognised claim on the sympathy of the public. But the inevitable reaction was at hand; ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... again and wiped his face with it: still no expression from the audience. Lemaitre then put the wig in his pocket: the audience remained silent. Surprised at their indulgence, the actor advanced to the prompter's hole at the front of the stage, bent down grotesquely, took out his snuff-box and offered some to the invisible functionary: the audience broke out in a fury. Lemaitre drew the wig from his pocket and threw it at the souffleur's head: a frightful tumult followed. The pit climbed over the footlights, determined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... admirers among professed Southern or Northern adherents: it is not in that aspect that I speak of them for the moment, but rather as figures in the popular imagination. As such, Davis was credited with all the qualities of a powerful statesman; while Lincoln showed as a not ill-meaning, but grotesquely inadequate and misplaced oddity, a sort of mere accident of mob-favor, and made abundant mirth for the mirthful: how justly the event has perhaps demonstrated. Among the Northern generals, I think ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the room with the medicine, and Beulah stood before the bright wood fire and watched the ruddy light flashing grotesquely over the pictures on the wall. The gas had not yet been lighted; she crossed the room, and sat down before the window. A red glow still lingered in the west, and, one by one, the stars came swiftly out. She took up a book she had been reading ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... made no sign, and, at last, with a grotesquely concerned face, he went out of the room and downstairs, hanging ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... foreign character, produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual, military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... very easily and readily, but her tears are easily dried and her joy is grotesquely childlike. She is readily frightened, worries without restraint and finds a melancholy satisfaction in the worst. At the same time, her fears do not persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement or good fortune. She ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... former. Again, and yet again, and again, a fresh animal came up, seemed to be reasoned and certainly was fought with and overcome by Lina, until at last, before they were out of the wood, she was followed by forty-nine of the most grotesquely ugly, the most extravagantly abnormal animals imagination can conceive. To describe them were ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... rich hues had become in a measure dimmed, covered the walls; and curious old pictures hung around; the chairs and tables were of heavy dark wood, elaborately and grotesquely carved, as was also the ebony clock in the corner, whose wonderful mechanism had so astonished him on the previous evening. A low lounge, covered with a crimson material, occupied a remote corner of the room, with a Turkish mat spread ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... sprigged muslin? Indeed, there is indescribable piquancy in this unconscious grouping of the pickers and their freedom from restraint. For each artistic bit—a laughing face in an aureole of amber clusters, a statuesque chin and throat, Indians in grotesquely picturesque raiment, and the yellow visages of the Chinese—the vines make an idyllic framing with a sinking summer sun in the background lending a shimmering transparency to ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... not quite clear, but, even so, the situation struck him as grotesquely amusing. "I'm no song-and- dance man," he said, with a smile. "What would you expect me ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... accusations against poetry can be satisfactorily answered. The charge of silliness, of being ridiculous, however, cannot be refuted by argument. There is no logical answer to a guffaw. This sense of the ridiculous is merely a bad, infantile habit, in itself grotesquely ridiculous. You may see it particularly in the theatre. Not the greatest dramatist, not the greatest composer, not the greatest actor can prevent an audience from laughing uproariously at a tragic moment if a ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... entirely to dissipate the impression of meanness in the face of the stricken man. The lips were set in a little sneer, the half-closed eyes were small, the clean-shaven jaw was long and underhung, the ears were large and grotesquely prominent. ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... dignified lady, accompanied by a short, important man in immaculate black, came along the path, and approached the open door of the vehicle. Nickie advanced carelessly, and intercepted them. He bowed grotesquely. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... to me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... fight with some brother of the same craft, was quite ready for an affair that could only increase his popularity. Catching up his jharroo, or broom, he began to shower blows upon the unfortunate Piroo, yet never ceasing to dance round him so grotesquely that the fight was too much of a farce for any one to think of interfering. Yet the blows went home pretty hard, and as the broom was a sort of besom made of the springy ribs of the palm-leaf it stung sharply where it found ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... any degree of accuracy and completeness. As soon as they recede at any considerable distance from us, they are subject to a sort of atmospheric effect. Much grows indistinct and drops altogether out of sight, and what is still seen often takes a new and grotesquely unlike shape. More than this, the play of fancy, like the action of some refracting medium, bends and distorts the outlines of memory's objects, making ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... known as "old Mis' Meade," gave a majestic clearing of her throat. She brought her gaze indoors and bent a frowning glance on the two at the stove. A shade of vexation passed over her face, grotesquely elongating the downward-dropping lines. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... engine moved, off popped young Billy Lusk from his cow-catcher. With an exclamation of horror she sprang down, and Mr. McLean appeared, and, with all a parent's fright and rage, held the boy by the arm grotesquely as the sheriff ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... they were in perfect accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbe Bordier's shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien was smiling at the vision only his eyes ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... tents in which dark figures bulked grotesquely against canvas walls. In one a man seemed to be dancing with a large animal which Stanley told her was ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... instead of the sea (and so have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,—the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,—and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob in his ears grotesquely: "And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine, drowned in the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... lot of twisting of his body and some pain to his mistreated wrist bones to bring forth the contents of his trousers' pockets. The chain kinked time and again as he groped with the undermost hand for the openings; his dumpy, pudgy form writhed grotesquely. But finally he finished. The search produced four cigars somewhat crumpled and frayed; some matches in a gun-metal case, a silver cigar cutter, two five-dollar bills, a handful of silver chicken feed, the leather case of the eyeglasses, a couple of quill ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... that to other men, but not to him, for he was in love with her. He swore it; he would say it on his knees, to make her believe it. Madly in love with her! But she mimicked him grotesquely, raising one hand to her breast ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for a time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he thought, grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads were round, and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the mulberries and were hidden from us by a hedge (hedges only occur round mulberry plots). He told me that one was enhancing to her companion the tremendous dignity of the Crown Prince by exaggerating grotesquely the size of the house he lived in, which reminded me of the servant who told her friend that "Queen Victoria was so rich that she had a piano in her kitchen." Generally the conversational topics of the villagers seemed to be people and prices. Undoubtedly, I was told, the subjects which were most ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... could not refrain from agreeing with him, that where such a thing was possible, something must be entirely wrong. I could not deny that under the circumstances Ostend was a sham, a delusion, and a snare! When he observed that Ostend was grotesquely expensive, I admitted that he was right. When he said that it was not a patch upon Boulogne or Dieppe, I again acquiesced. When he asserted that every English tourist would be wise to avoid the place, I acknowledged that there was the genuine ring of truth in his declaration. When he appealed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... own face was a shock to him. If he was pale, the dust and grime of his fight in the cavern concealed his pallor. But the face that stared at him from out of the glass was haggard, wildly and almost grotesquely haggard, and he turned from it with a grim laugh, and set his jaws hard. He returned to the table, and bit by bit tore the photograph into thin shreds, and then piled the shreds on his ash-tray and burned them. He opened a window to let out the smoke and smell of charring paper, and ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely, grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them and what ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... ridiculous deadlock on the Naval Aid Bill, when his supporters went so grotesquely far as to read the Bible to talk out the Bill, he was away from the House for a week, reported as quite ill, in reality having a very delicious time at home reading light literature. The day he came back the news of his coming was heralded ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... standing still now, submitting in a gloomy silence to the various comments on his appearance, which was incredibly different from that with which he had started on his travels. The starch remaining in a few places in his suit, now partly dried in the hot sun, caused the linen to stand out grotesquely in peaks and mud-streaked humps, his hair, still wet, hung in wisps about his very dirty face, his bare, red feet and legs protruded from shapeless knickerbockers. His stepmother looked at him with her usual good-natured amused ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... repulsive,—certainly not so when lighted up by conversation.' Another witness—the 'Jessamy Bride'—declares that 'his benevolence was unquestionable, and his countenance bore every trace of it.' His true likeness would seem to lie midway between the grotesquely truthful sketch by Bunbury prefixed in 1776 to the 'Haunch of Venison', and the portrait idealized by personal regard, which Reynolds painted in 1770. In this latter he is shown wearing, in place of his customary wig, his own scant brown hair, and, on this occasion, masquerades ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... extraordinarily true. I once met a man, journeying, who told me he liked living in a sleeping-car; than which to me a dozen gales, with their abounding fresh air, would be preferable. Yet this ditty does grotesquely reproduce the lazy satisfaction and security of the old-timers under ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... was as if she saw the face of a stranger. His eyes were half closed and glittering fiercely; his lips protruded as if grotesquely pouting to express scorn, and on each side of the distended nostrils a deep vertical wrinkle showed like the blackened gash ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... for a moment. Her face, which was rather straw-colour than white, worked grotesquely as if under the influence of some strong emotion that she was trying to suppress. At length she said, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... none, this manuscript, just as it is, could never have been written by Alix. On "this 22d of August, 1795," she could not have perpetrated such statements as these two. Her memory of persons and events could not have been so grotesquely at fault, nor could she have hoped so to deceive any one. The misstatements are of later date, and from some one to whom the two events were historical. But the manuscript is all in one simple, undisguised, feminine handwriting, and with no interlineation save ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... very much as what is known as a "knock-out" in sparring affects a man. Absolutely unconscious at first, he recovered intelligence slowly, though practically uninjured. Harlson stood beside the grotesquely trussed figure and watched the return to consciousness with curiosity. The cool night air ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar state—a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lit grotesquely by the uncertain glow of two seal-oil lamps, mounted on two posts, planted one in front of the right sleeping-bench, the other on ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... which the financier extended toward the card shook grotesquely; the diamonds which adorned it sparkled and twinkled starrily. Before his eyes a red mist seemed to dance; but, through it, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... fence. The young man stared in surprise as he waited for the other to regain his feet. The officer's words had roused a sudden flash of fury, and with nerves already strained to the breaking point, he had struck. But the man, grotesquely sprawled behind the barrels, ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... two projecting heights which commanded a view of this pass, some old trees, grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with painful efforts, like scouts who had started in advance of the multitude heaped together in the rear. When we turned round we saw the entire forest stretched beneath our feet, like a gigantic basin of verdure, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm towards an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring headlights threw his shadow sharply against the wall inside. The shadow pictured grotesquely elongated legs and arms that ran along the floor and up the wall of the corridor. It looked, for all the world, like a ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... believe, to the reign of Edward VI, and had originally served as the residence of noble families. Built, or, rather, faced with split flints, and edged and buttressed with cut grey stone, it had a majestic though very gloomy appearance, and seen from afar resembled nothing so much as a huge and grotesquely decorated sarcophagus. In the centre of its frowning and menacing front was the device of a cat, constructed out of black shingles, and having white shingles for the eyes; the effect being curiously realistic, especially on moonlight nights, when anything more lifelike ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... big, broad-shouldered man, tanned to the very limit of brownness, painfully clean shaven, and grotesquely clean in dress; a white shirt, innocent of bluing in its laundry, a glistening celluloid collar, a black necktie (the last two features evidently just added to the toilet, and neither as yet set to their service), dark pantaloons and ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... these incomprehensible remarks. A peasant soon appeared on the road; he was dancing grotesquely and flinging his arms about with meaningless gestures. Almost paralyzed with curiosity, I glued my eyes on the hilarious spectacle. As the man reached a point in the road where he would vanish from our view, Sri Yukteswar said, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... attitude, her pathetic gestures, gave extraordinary force to an appeal which, by contrast with her extreme agitation, was almost grotesquely inconsequent. Curtis was at his wits' end to find the line of reasoning calculated to convince this beautiful creature that she might, indeed, begin enduring "for the sake of others" by expressing her determination to give ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... walked amid shell craters, sometimes knee-deep in mud; I stumbled over rifles half buried in the slime, on muddy knapsacks, over muddy bags half full of rusty bombs, and so upon the body of a dead German soldier. With arms wide-flung and writhen legs grotesquely twisted he lay there beneath my boot, his head half buried in the mud, even so I could see that the maggots had been busy, though the ....[1] had killed them where they clung. So there he lay, this dead Boche, skull gleaming under ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... alacrity, not to alight till not only Elmira was left behind, but more weary suburbs, too, on the other side. That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly, on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens—beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries! Here, however, our wanderings in the brick-and-mortar wilderness were to end, for by a long, romantic, ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... limped off toward Woosung Road, grotesquely but incredibly fast for a man with only one sound leg. He never used a cane, having the odd fancy that a stick would only emphasize his affliction. He might have taken a 'ricksha this morning, but he never thought of it until he had crossed ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... my way to my room I came suddenly upon the Prince, in a recess of the upper hall, addressing somebody through an open door with a querulous protest, whose wild extravagance of statement was grotesquely balanced by its utter feeble timidity of manner. "It is," said the Prince, "indeed a grave affair. We have here hundreds of socialists, emissaries from lawless countries and impossible places, who travel thousands of miles to fall upon our hearts ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... padded for days; now a sleepy negro on a load of hay, an organ grinder with a chattering monkey or a clumsy bear, another sleepy negro with another load of hay, and a picturesque minstrel with an elaborate musical contrivance drawn by a horse. Now a capering Italian with a bagpipe, who danced grotesquely to his own piping, and piped the pennies out of rural pockets as if they had been so many copper ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empresse, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something ... something. I could not quite ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its shallowness. It was this shallowness that made its draining feasible. All about arose jumbled mountains, with ice-scarred peaks and crags, grotesquely shaped and grouped. All was topsyturvy and unsystematic—a Dore nightmare. So fantastic and impossible was it that it affected Smoke as more like a cosmic landscape-joke than a rational portion of earth's surface. There were many ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... a state; not only a state; but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... tail. Altogether, it impressed upon the mind a strong idea of a formidable monster, in spite of its relatively diminutive head; for its fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... the harbor a smile played over Uncle William's face grotesquely. He gave a shove to the boat and sprang in. "I guess you'll go, Andrew," he said; "you wouldn't want a man drowned ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... it for a moment wonderingly as it lay absurdly curled in the palm of her hand, and then she burst into tears. The thing was so grotesquely trivial. It meant so much. It was a sign and a token falling, as it were, from the sky into the midst of her despairing mood, rebuking her, summoning her, declaring an unknown mission which she was ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... rose, a kind of transformation-scene took place. The whole level land lifted at the horizon till the teams seemed crawling forever at bottom of an enormous bowl. Mystical forms came into view—grotesquely elongated, unrecognizable. Hills twenty, thirty miles away rose like apparitions, astonishingly magnified. Willows became elms, a settler's shanty rose like a shot-tower—towns hitherto unseen swam and palpitated in the yellow flood of light like shaken ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... dreams are rearranged and glorified memories. How could these people reconstruct the torn carpets and tin cans and waste-paper of their lives into mythology? How could memories of Ladies' Entrance squalor be made into Castles in Granada or Carcassonne? The things they drank to see, and saw but grotesquely, and paid for terribly, now roll before them with no after pain or punishment. The mumbled conversation, the sociability for which they leaned over the tables, they have here in the same manner with far more to talk about. They come, they go home, men and women together, as casually and impulsively ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... became sufficiently wide awake to assimilate thoroughly these astonishing facts, the intruder, who was grotesquely armed with a can of hot coffee and a loaf of bread, deposited his burdens, and falling upon the recumbent ecclesiastic, proceeded to sit upon his head, forcing his face into the pillow, and rendering it impossible for him to utter a single ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... himself grotesquely, in an attitude of mirth, On a damask-covered hassock that was sitting on the hearth; And at a magic signal of his stubby little thumb, I saw the fireplace changing to a ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... this poem contains passages most faithfully, if fearfully, picturesque, and that it is characterised throughout by a profound pathos, and an abundant though at times a too grotesquely incongruous humour. Can we wonder, then, at the immense popularity with which Samuel Lover recited it in the United States? For to Lover's admiration of the poem, and his addition of it to his entertainment, 'Shamus O'Brien' owes its introduction into America, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... thought of the sixteenth century was conducive to imperial expansion. The feudal fragments of kingdoms were being fused into a true nationalism. It was the day of the mercantilists, when gold and silver were given a grotesquely exaggerated place in the national economy and self-sufficiency was deemed to be the goal of every great nation. Freed from the restraint of rivals, the nation sought to produce its own raw material, control its own trade, and carry its ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... with a startling suddenness. It was an exceedingly clear, melodious voice, yet with a steely ring in it. The two friends wheeled round sharply to find themselves face to face with an exceedingly tall individual, whose length was almost grotesquely added to by the amazing slimness of his figure. In that respect he was not at all unlike the type of human skeleton which one generally expects to find in a travelling circus, or some show of that kind. The man, moreover, was dressed in deep black, ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... audience, but not one more entertained than the cluster of men who looked and paused and leered in amusement at one another, and thrust out satirical tongues. Long after they had disappeared, the strains of the violin could be heard, filling the solemn, stricken, strangely stunted woods with a grotesquely ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one's self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously, and the broken ice on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... a beaten droop of the proud little head, and again I was shamed. Never have I felt so grotesquely out of proportion with myself as at that moment. My stature seemed to increase from an even six feet to something like twelve, and my bulk became elephantine. She was so slender, so lissom, so weak, and I so gargantuan, so gorilla-like, so heavy-handed! ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the wildness of Armstrong's youth had evidently become a family tradition, and even, by a familiar process, an article of belief in his own mind. It reminded me grotesquely of Justice Shallow's reminiscences with Sir John Falstaff: "Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that, that this knight and I have seen.... Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various |
