"Deformity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you can, you begin to relish the jest. The toys are very odd,—particularly the Roman whistles;—some of these are made of pewter, with a little wheel that whirls as you blow; others are of terra-cotta, very rudely modelled into every shape of bird, beast, and human deformity, each with a whistle in its head, breast, or tail, which it is no joke to hear, when blown close to your ears by a stout pair of lungs. The scene is very picturesque. Above, the dark vault of night, with its far stars, the blazing and flaring of lights below, and the great, dark walls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... lip, not hanging from it but fitted into a hole in it in such a manner as to thrust the lip straight and far out from the face. As the ring is about the size of an ordinary napkin-ring, it may be easily believed, that time is required for the formation of the deformity. At an early age the middle of the upper lip of a girl is pierced close to the nose, and a small pin introduced to prevent the hole closing up. After it is healed the pin is taken out and a larger one forced into its place, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... strong feelings of revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature. His father was a gambler and a spendthrift. His mother was eccentric to a degree. Byron himself, throughout his boyish years, had been morbidly sensitive because of a physical deformity—a lame, misshapen foot. This and the strange treatment which his mother accorded him left him headstrong, wilful, almost from the first an enemy to whatever ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... mischievous person to inflict innumerable annoyances. It is every day in the power of an amiable person to confer little services. It not seldom happens that serious distress and danger call forth, in genuine beauty and deformity, heroic virtues and abject vices which, in the ordinary intercourse of good society, might remain during many years unknown even to intimate associates. Under such circumstances met Warren Hastings and the Baroness Imhoff, two persons whose accomplishments would have attracted ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... drawn between men are commonly based on the outward appearance of goodness or badness, on the ground of moral beauty or moral deformity—is this classification scientific? Or is there a deeper distinction between the Christian and the not-a-Christian as fundamental as that between the organic and the inorganic? Natural ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... were some women and children. Two of the men accompanied him to the tent. It was evident from the whole tenor of their behaviour that they had previously heard of white people (most probably from the settlement at New Castle); their appearance was most miserable, their features approached deformity, and their persons were disgustingly filthy: their small attenuated limbs seemed scarcely able to support their bodies; and their entire person formed a marked contrast to the fine and manly figures of their brethren in the interior. We gave them a small turtle which we had just caught ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... From the deformity, the distress, or calamity of others, derive lessons of thankfulness to God, and hymns of grateful praise to your Creator, Governor, and Benefactor, who has formed you in a better mould, and guarded you from those evils. Learn also the sacred ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... two kinds of joints we find in the body? 12. Is there any arrangement for oiling the joints? If so, what is it? 13. When you soak a bone in weak acid, what happens? What does this prove? 14. What causes disease or deformity of the bones? ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... stood looking up from his squat, toad-like deformity into the face of the man who towered above him, yet in his eyes was the blaze with which a giant might ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... It was cruel to think—he could wish him dead first—that his clean, white mind must become smeared and spotted here, his well-tuned ear reconciled to loud discords, and his fine eye at peace with deformity; but there was no help for it." And then, as though he had suddenly detected in my face an expression of surprised discovery, he said, "But I am sure I do not know how I came to say so much, or let myself be tedious with sickly egotisms to a polite, but indifferent, stranger. If you have gathered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... he was called, seemed to be perfectly indifferent to the whole matter. He at one time inquired if the princess were free from any deformity. Upon being told that she was, he seemed quite contented, and asked no farther questions. In anticipation of the marriage, a lady, Madame de Maintenon, whose name henceforth became inseparably connected with that of Louis XIV., was appointed to the ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... depths of its despair? 'Twas given to man as his best boon—his most precious gift; but his own hands polluted the shrine—marred the beauteous and holy deposit. The loveliest image was then smitten with deformity, and that passion, the highest and noblest that could animate his bosom, became the bane of his happiness, the destroyer of his peace, and the source whence every attribute of woe hath sprung to afflict and darken the frail hopes of humanity. This may be the dark side ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... listened. She laughed because, being a woman, she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty; because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... except to pity me, and I would rather be strangled than pitied! I wish I was dead and at rest in Greenwood! I wish somebody would knock my brains out with my crutch! and save me from hobbling through life. Even my mother is ashamed of my deformity! She ought to have treated me as the Spartans did their dwarfs! She ought to have thrown me into the East River before I was a day old! I wish I was dead! Oh! ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... animated portraiture, and much dull, pedantic disquisition. In these delineations we now and then meet with a touch of his pencil, which, from its simplicity and vigor, may be called truly Dantesque. Indeed, the Castilian Muse never before ventured on so bold a flight; and, notwithstanding the deformity of the general plan, the obsolete barbarisms of the phraseology, its quaintness and pedantry, notwithstanding the cantering dactylic measure in which it is composed, and which to the ear of a foreigner can scarcely be made tolerable, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... long been sick, knows more than his doctor; he knows the disease, and that is more than can be said for the best of doctors. Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart when the woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his deformity; he ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes seductive, just as the sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone is incurable. I have had neither father nor mother since I was six years old; I am now twenty-five. Public charity has been my mother, the procureur ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and pronounced a name which he knew was quite impossible for a white man's tongue to manage. Everybody laughed, including the newcomer, who put up his mutilated hand to cover his grinning mouth. Mick noticed the deformity at once. The man's hand, with its three fingers set wide apart, from which long hard nails stuck out, resembled the claw of some bird, so the drover turned to the white boys and said: "What d'you think of that for a name? They've nearly ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Empress Eleanor, had wedded, on account of her great wealth, a young Hungarian noblewoman, by whom he had two children, both of whom were living. Such was his dislike of their mother, on account of a slight deformity, that for four or five years he shamefully maltreated her, and at last shut her up in this dungeon-keep, allowing her daily the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... your Scorn Will be by Time repaid; Those Glories which that Face adorn, And flourish as the rising Morn, Must one day set and fade. Then all your cold Disdain for me Will but increase Deformity, When still the kind will lovely be. Compassion is of lasting Praise; For ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... The forehead is but moderately developed, and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally; the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration, that, on the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from below. On the whole, Shakespeare must have had a singular rather than a prepossessing ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vain, little mother, he positively said all these things and was so angry—"have been combined with the rubbish, in this case irrelevant and actually harmful, that goes to make up the usual pretty young face. Mees Chrees, I could have wished you some minor deformity, such as many spots, for then you would not now be in this lamentable condition of being loved and responding to it. And if," he said as a parting shot, "Providence was determined to commit this folly, it need not have crowned ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... burlesque prints came out to ridicule his system. There was a better answer to it in one of the two prints that he gave to illustrate his hypothesis. In "The Ball," had he confined himself to such outlines as compose awkwardness and deformity, he would have proved half his assertion; but he has added two samples of grace in a young lord and lady that are strikingly stiff and affected. They are a Bath beau and a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... epileptic guinea-pigs) has been discussed by Professor Weismann and shown to be not conclusive. The mutilation itself—a section of certain nerves—was never inherited, but the resulting epilepsy, or a general state of weakness, deformity, or sores, was sometimes inherited. It is, however, possible that the mere injury introduced and encouraged the growth of certain microbes, which, spreading through the organism, sometimes reached the germ-cells, and thus ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... source. (1) some very ancient scribe mistook the first four letters of [Greek: agioi] for [Greek: apo]. It was but the mistaking of [Greek: AGIO] for [Greek: APO]. At the end of 1700 years, the only Copies which witness to this deformity are BP with four cursives,—in opposition to [Symbol: Aleph]AKL and the whole body of the cursives, the Vulgate[83] and the Harkleian. Euthalius knew nothing of it[84]. Obvious it was, next, for some one in perplexity,—(2) to introduce both readings ([Greek: apo] and [Greek: hagioi]) ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds a looking-glass. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge. The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune," resembles that which he was painting in his larger works at the end ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... bones knitting more firmly, where the strength of bodily endurance, as well as of bodily activity, is daily becoming greater; it is self-evident that, if the inward changes which ought to accompany these outward ones are making no progress, there cannot but be derangement and deformity in the system. And, therefore, when I look around, I cannot but wish generally that the change from childhood to manhood in the three great points of wisdom, of unselfishness, and of thoughtfulness, might be hastened from its actual rate of progress ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... were seen some spirits who were like what they had been during their abode as men on their earth. They had faces not unlike the faces of the men of our Earth, except that their eyes and nose were small. As this appeared to me something of a deformity, they said that with them small eyes and a small nose are considered a beauty. A female was seen, clothed in a gown ornamented with roses of various colours. I asked whence they procured for themselves ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the author, J. T. Mathias, himself a Fellow of Trinity, "is mere genius without a regulated life! To show the deformity of vice to the rising hopes of the country, the policy of ancient Sparta ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... left alone. He was a youth of about twenty, but looked older. Heavy brows shaded deep-set eyes, his shoulders were square, with a slight deformity of the spine. His name ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... end, it is said, the island became, nine tenths of it, church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed by a natural protuberance of the region just below the small of the back—although, most unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women have in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd, very—like something between a turkey-cock and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rather than awkward, and with a face that indicated bad health, bad temper, or both. Its manner was peevish and fractious, its tones sharp and harsh, and its actions rough and hasty. I took it for a mother's sickly favourite, deformed in character to compensate for physical deformity. Watching them for a short time, I saw the little creature repeatedly break out in all the humours of an ill-tempered, over-indulged youngest-born in an ill-managed family; snatching toys from the others, and now and then slapping or pinching them. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... committed in it-of the stubborn vileness of the dwellers therein. God knows he never wants to descend into it. "Truly," Brother Phills interposes, "I walked through it once, and beheld with mine eyes such sights, such human deformity! O, God! Since then, I am content to go to my home through Broadway. I never forget to shudder when I look into the vile place from a distance, nevertheless." Brother Phills says this after the manner of a philosopher, fretting his fingers, and contorting his comely face the while. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us,—these were the accented points in the scenery. The more immediate scenery consisted of fields and farm-houses outside the car and a monster-headed dwarf and a moustached woman inside it. These latter were not show-people. Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deformity of the genital organs, hypospadias, which prevented sexual intercourse, in consequence of which he gave himself up to the practice of self-abuse. He had become reduced to the most deplorable condition of both mind and body, and presented a most ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Its mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its inmates meet you ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... round the table for help, but none of the party would meet my eyes, avoiding my glance with a determination that could not be mistaken. I might have suffered from some loathsome deformity. Frank, alone, appeared unaware of my innocent appeal for an explanation. He was bending gloomily over his plate, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts—though how any man could be gloomy after his recent experience it ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... a good constitution! What a striking instance of health, youth, and beauty! How emblematically grotesque! The very image of deformity and infirmity! A perfect mirror for Milton's description of Sin ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... adult has a deformity produced prior to his birth by the fright of his mother. When wrested from 178:15 human belief and based on Science or the divine Mind, to which all things are possible, that chronic case is ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... of it: and his breast and some part of his arms were also made white with the same paint; not for beauty or ornament, one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said to do, he seemed thereby to design the looking more terrible; this his painting adding very much to his natural deformity; for they all of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, though I have seen great variety of savages. These New Hollanders were probably the same sort of people as those I met with on this coast ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... indulged, for a few moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert's content shone forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied face can ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was responsible for the overwhelming calamities which overtook his country, and which his country never forgave. In less than a month he fell from what seemed to be the proudest position in Europe, and stood out to the eye of the world in all the hateful deformity of a defeated despot who deserved to fall. The suddenness and completeness of his destruction has been paralleled only by the defeat of the armies of Darius by Alexander the Great. All delusions as to Louis Napoleon's abilities vanished forever. All his former grandeur, even his services, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... of repentance is indeed a stricken state of human consciousness, wherein mortals gain [20] severe views of themselves; a state of mind which rends the veil that hides mental deformity. Tears flood the eyes, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... forms acted and reacted on the beauty of their "Art of Dress," so we may be certain that all deformity of dress has been produced by deformity of race in mind or body, and that climate is an important factor in both. The cold of the farthest north has produced people short, fat, and hairy; which natural gifts have been supplemented by ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... situation. He describes it as an ulcer, soon becoming black and foetid, corroding the inside of both lips, separating them widely from the gums and allowing them to fall outwards upon the face; thus producing a horrible deformity. Besides this, the author states, that a deep fissure usually extended down each half of the inside of each lip; thus adding four deep and ghastly ramifications to the ulcer. This shocking affection is stated to have prevailed extensively, both in England and Ireland; in which latter country ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... old Portuguese historian: "It was formerly the custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide by taking poison when any disaster or natural physical defect fell upon them, such as impotence, infectious disease, the loss of their front teeth, by which they were disfigured, or any other deformity or affliction. To put an end to such defects they killed themselves, saying that the king should be free from any blemish, and if not, it was better for his honour that he should die and seek another life where he would be made whole, for there everything ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... generally recognized as art or science. True, if he had been a violinist prodigy or mathematical prodigy, he would have had some respect from his fellows—about equal to that he might have received if he were gifted with some pleasant deformity, such as six toes on a foot—but he would never have enjoyed such deadly prestige as had actually come to be his. In brief, then, Wallie Torbin had a ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... who has retired, with his fat and the gout, to Bayswater. Miss Price is a lovely dancer, appearing hollow (a thing Miss Gay did not doubt), like an India rubber ball in flounces; she is said to have a beautiful hand, so small as to require only No. 6. gloves—as if a pigmy hand could not be a deformity. She is invited, in a hope that young Brown may make her a partner, for the dance of life; and is said to be worth L150,000—not by the pound weight, as the envious Miss Gay hinted.—No! No! naughty Miss Gay, be satisfied with Nature's gifts, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... symptom of the disease, as tooth-ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others again are taken from the deformity occasioned in consequence of the unnatural fibrous motions, which constitute diseases, as tumours, eruptions, extenuations; all these therefore improperly give names to diseases; and some difficulty ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... contact, and the heels only so pared as to take no bearing at all. A few such shoeings sees the defect remedied. In every instance paring of the sole should be discouraged, as it serves but to increase the deformity. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... a masterpiece of dissembling. It suggested, without promising, that Charles Maxwell intended to send his young charge to boarding school along with his housekeeper's daughter. It asked the school's advice and explained the deformity that made Charles Maxwell a recluse. The reply could hardly have been better if they'd penned it themselves for the signature of the faculty advisor. It discussed the pros and cons of away-from-home ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... indissoluble Truth, Wherein redress reveals itself divine, Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss, Disease and desolation, are the dreams Of wasted excellence; and every dream Has in it something of an ageless fact That flouts deformity and laughs ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... careful measuring and all care in cutting, the waist may not fit, owing to some deformity or peculiarity of the figure. Such figures require especially careful fitting and the hollow place should be filled out with wadding. This needs to be done with the greatest ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... Cambridge set—Hobhouse, Matthews, and others—to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies. Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, though it did not greatly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... or Eboe to those of any other part of Guinea, for their hardiness, intelligence, integrity, and zeal. Those benefits are felt by us in the general healthiness of the people, and in their vigour and activity; I might have added too in their comeliness. Deformity is indeed unknown amongst us, I mean that of shape. Numbers of the natives of Eboe now in London might be brought in support of this assertion: for, in regard to complexion, ideas of beauty are wholly relative. I remember while ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... that year he came to Russia, and came to see me. Moist eyes of almond shape, smiling red lips, a little moustache well waxed, hair brushed in the latest fashion, a vulgarly pretty face,—what the women call 'not bad,'—feebly built physically, but with no deformity; with hips as broad as a woman's; correct, and insinuating himself into the familiarity of people as far as possible, but having that keen sense that quickly detects a false step and retires in reason,—a man, in short, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Every deformity, disease or operation which destroys the sexual glands in the child, or prevents them from developing, gives rise to the phenomena which we have described when speaking of castration. This is the case, for instance, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... condition than those who have none? Can you pretend this, you who have so great a share, and desired so earnestly to have it? But let us come to the fact, if you please. Putting aside my ugliness and deformity, is there anything in me which displeased you? Are you dissatisfied with my birth, my wit, ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... cut in formal lines, mutilated statues, precise and treeless terraces, and other elaborated monstrosities. These places are not entirely without a pretension to magnificence; but, considered in reference to what is desirable in landscape gardening, they are the very laid ideal of deformity. After winding our way for eight or ten hours amid such scenes, the towers of Rouen came in view. They had a dark ebony-coloured look, which did great violence to our Manhattanese notions, but which harmonized ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... necessary for carrying out the reforms on the promise of which France had abstained from active intervention. If any such hopes existed they were doomed to speedy disappointment. The apparatus of priestly maladministration was restored in all its ancient deformity. An amnesty which had been promised by the Legate Benvenuti was disregarded, and the Pope set himself to strengthen his authority by enlisting new bands of ruffians and adventurers under the standard of St. Peter. Again insurrection ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... rectus muscles have been cut and cicatrized, and if the deformity be not congenital, ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... to personal needs. Once an opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root. All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him, if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to season. It is a survival that is as spiritually ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... deemed a man of men Faulty, as great men are, but with no taint Of baseness,—with those faults that shew the saint Of after days, perhaps,—wert even then When first I loved thee but a spreading tree Whose leaves shewed not its roots' deformity; ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... liberty, and torment by scorn, all who either fall short, or exceed the usual standard, if they happen to have the additional misfortune of poverty. Perhaps we are in no part more susceptible than in our vanity, how much then must those poor wretches suffer, whose deformity would lead them to wish to be secluded from human view, in being exposed to the public, whose observations are no better than expressions of scorn, and who are surprised to find that any thing less than themselves can speak, or appear ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... - orations? - pamphlets? - meetings? and addresses? - That seems to me nothing exactly new either, nor has it proved effectual. Is one deformity like the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... and God sent to them a shameful token, for the children that were born after in that place had tails, as it is said, till they had repented them. It is said commonly that this fell at Strood in Kent, but blessed be God at this day is no such deformity. Item in another place there were certain people which would in no wise give faith to his preaching ne his doctrine, but scorned and mocked him, wherefore God took such vengeance that they burned with fire invisible, so that their skin was red as blood, and suffered ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... lovely and sing so sweet; I know there's nothing nicer in heaven," said a little piece of deformity to her one day as it lay dying in her arms. "I'se goin' to heaven, which I shouldn't have done if you'se hadn't gin me the nice bun and told me of Jesus. I loves him now, and I'll tell him how you bringed me ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... a man of very small stature, whose bare head shone with hair-oil, and whose tight-fitting, light-coloured coat showed in all its elegance the deformity of his back. Their words were not audible, but Astier seemed much excited. He brandished his stick and bent himself forward over the face of the little creature, who for his part was perfectly calm, and stood, as if his mind was made up, with his two large ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to believe that this creta of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only needs assiduous labour ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... eyes; suddenly he felt all the gnawing, hungry needs of his soul; suddenly his weakness, his wanderings, his infirmities, his tacit unbelief and indifference, were revealed, in all their frightful deformity,—and how? By a still, calm voice—the voice of a child, which had rung down the warning into his soul like thunder. "What will it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" it had said; and earth and earthly affairs had assumed the ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... of some larger law, is not imperfection, but uncomprehended perfection. Is there, then, no imperfection? We are haunted by such a thought. We see first a mixed beauty in faces, partly life and partly organization; the body is never symmetrical, deformity is the rule. But beauty will not be measured by form; the body cannot long occupy good eyes; we begin to look through that, and encounter some courage, generosity, or tenderness, a dawning or dominant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... When there is deformity of body, or an unhappy peculiarity of temper or mind liable to be inherited, people should not marry, or if they live together, should resign the uses of marriage. People should conscientiously refrain from propagating hereditary diseases. ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... and ebony, male and female, or almost sexless in the excess of deformity, there were some to suit all tastes. Each wore a tablet hung round the neck by a green cord: on this were writ the chief merits of the wearer, and also a list of his or her defects, so that intending purchasers might know what ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... specks and blemishes on the surface he perceived clearly enough, but he had no knowledge of the secret, deep-rooted causes by which these specks and blemishes were produced. The simple fact that a man was a Russian satisfactorily accounted, in his opinion, for any kind of moral deformity; and his knowledge turned out to be by no means so extensive as I had at first supposed. Though he had been many years in the country, he knew very little about the life of the peasants beyond that small part of it which concerned ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... instantly fled to "the bush;" and, that night, in the agony of delirium, caused by fever and dreaded deformity, the mate terminated ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no other art has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The Japanese have generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorial presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty where we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... died three years ago. They have two hundred and sixty thousand pounds apiece. A marchioness— or a grocer—-nothing comes amiss to the digestion of that family.(991) If the rest of the trunk was filled with money, I believe they would really marry Carafattatouadaht—what was the lump of deformity called in the Persian Tales, that was sent to the lady in a coffer? And as to marrying both the girls, it would cost my Lord Hardwicke but a new marriage-bill: I suppose it is all one to his conscience whether he prohibits matrimony or licenses bigamy. Poor ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Department of Military Orthopedics to care for soldiers, so far as orthopedics (the prevention of deformity) was concerned, continuously until they were returned to civil life. Orthopedic surgeons were attached to the medical force near the firing line and to the different hospitals back to the base orthopedic hospital which was established within one hundred miles of the firing line. In this ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... gray, coarse, and shaggy. His forehead was spacious and commanding; the eye was dark-blue, with an expression both majestic and benignant. His nose was aquiline but crooked. The lower part of his face was famous for its deformity. The under lip, a Burgundian inheritance, as faithfully transmitted as the duchy and county, was heavy and hanging; the lower jaw protruding so far beyond the upper that it was impossible for him to bring together the few fragments of teeth which still remained, or to speak a whole sentence ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... With strange deformity PLANTAGO treads, A Monster-birth! and lifts his hundred heads; Yet with soft love a gentle belle he charms, 80 And clasps the beauty in his hundred arms. So hapless DESDEMONA, fair and young, Won by OTHELLO'S captivating tongue, Sigh'd o'er each strange and piteous tale, distress'd, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... you how many American women asked me why Chinese women bandage their feet you would be amazed; yet every one of these submitted to and practised a deformity that has seriously affected the growth and development of the race. I am no iconoclast, but listen to the story of the American woman who, with one hand, deforms her waist in the most barbarous fashion, while waving the other in horror ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... fellow-workmen something unique, set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection struck through even her ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... wonder Joan Cromwell did not seize upon you, and keep you as her chief ape, while you were making your courtly acquaintance. A pretty figure for courts, truly!—ah! ah! ah!" As he laughed, he pointed his finger scornfully towards Robin Hays, who, however little he might care to jest upon his own deformity, was but ill inclined to tolerate those who even hinted at his defects. As the trooper persevered, his victim grew pale and trembled with suppressed rage. The man perceived the effect his cruel mockery produced, and continued to revile and take to pieces the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... should not be surprised if you prefer me to speak of your ugly deformity of a face and to be silent about your morals, which are infinitely more repulsive than your features. I will say nothing of them. In the first place I am not naturally of a quarrelsome disposition, and secondly I am ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... vanities of the world, and to stand for a time in utter nakedness of heart before his Maker,—and very beautiful the silk stockings of the Dowager Lady Canaan's footman, who carrieth with Sabbath humility his Lady's books to Church! Yet all this beauty is as deformity to the new-born loveliness of John Jones; who, on the furthermost seat—far from the vain convenience of pew and velvet hassock—sits, and inwardly blesses the one shilling and fourteen shillings costs, that with more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... upon our own spirits, do we not some day rouse to the distortion and deformity of sin? Do we wish to retain these grimacing phases of ourselves? Do we not yearn eagerly for the dignity and beauty of high virtue? Do we not long for the graces and perfections which make up a radiant and happy life? If we could be born ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... appeared on the brow of the hill, and every neck was craned for a glimpse of the poor creature who sat on the coffin—a pitiful-looking, half-dwarf mulatto, who gave you the idea of deformity and distress without your being able to tell why. He walked bravely to his place on the scaffold, singing and praying, protesting his innocence and bequeathing forgiveness to his enemies, apparently full of faith, like many others who by reason ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Marat, Danton and Robespierre, had deserved preeminence and held authority:—that is because they, due to a deformity or warping of their minds and their hearts, met ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... August 26, 1893), of the University of Durham, made the presidential address. He first alluded to the perfection to which the forceps had reached for pelves narrowed at the brim, and the means of correcting faulty position of the foetus during labor. He then stated: 'In cases of great deformity of the pelvis, it has long been the ambition of the obstetrician, where it has been impossible to deliver a living child per vias naturales, to find some means by which that child could be born alive with comparative safety to the mother; and that time has now ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... divine into an aspect upon which one can not gaze but with horror. From the field of Marengo many a young man returned to his home so multilated as no longer to be recognized by friends, and passed a weary life in repulsive deformity. Mercy abandons the arena of battle. The frantic war-horse with iron hoof tramples upon the mangled face, the throbbing and inflamed wounds the splintered bones, and heeds not the shriek of torture. Crushed into the bloody mire by the ponderous wheels of heavy artillery, the victim of barbaric ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... of good-sense; The last result of an accomplished mind, With outward grace, the body's virtue, joined. A violated decency now reigns; And nymphs for failings take peculiar pains. With Chinese painters modern toasts agree, The point they aim at is deformity: They throw their persons with a hoyden air Across the room, and toss into the chair. So far their commerce with mankind is gone, They, for our ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... does this lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their Deformity, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... had come to him with a great light, "on the road to Damascus," and by that light he saw, as he implored them to see, the hideous deformity of the life he and they and the young fellows of their usual companionship had been living. Even Ramsey knew, he continued as she and their old nurse silently reappeared, that by the plainest laws of the land, they were not too good for ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... sensuality was unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too limited for their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths, the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical and mental deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human. They are said by a Gothic historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs, or to the misshapen figures (something like, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... might have rather vanquished her disgust. Her second son Gam, who was now in the fourth year of his age, had been rickety from the cradle, and as remarkably unpromising in appearance as Perry was agreeable in his person. As the deformity increased, the mother's fondness was augmented, and the virulence of her hate against the other son seemed to prevail in the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... which filled up the whole period of the Twelve Years' Truce. His words had a direct influence on great events. He was a man of unquestionable erudition, of powers of mind above the average, while the absolute deformity of his moral constitution made him incapable of thinking, feeling, or acting rightly on any vital subject, by any accident or on any occasion. If there were one thing that he thoroughly hated in the world, it was the Reformed religion. If in his thought there ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... alone existed that perfect freedom of speech and intuitive understanding that lie at the root of all true and deep affection. His delicacy of appearance, his stunted stature, his invalid requisitions, nay, his very deformity, for his twisted limb amounted to this, put aside all thought of infantile flirtation (for we know that, strange as it may seem, such a thing does exist) from the first hour of our acquaintance. He always seemed to me much younger ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... common feature. But it must be added that there are instances in which the inclination is so decided that one is tempted to conclude either that the masons had very crooked sight, or that they were playing tricks with their perspective. The feature, where it is at all marked, is something of a deformity. In our own day it has been introduced, apparently by design, into the plan of Truro cathedral. In medieval work, however, it will seldom be found in a chancel where no enlargement upon an early site has taken place; and it seems safe to conclude that, like ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... use of the right hand with the shoulder elevated, and not unfrequently the oblique positions assumed in performing the daily vocations of life. With proper care, and by calling into action the left shoulder, this deformity ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly speaking amounted to brain-deformity. He assured me, that to the properly balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal, genius was an impossibility—it was a malady as unnatural as rare. 'And it is singular, very singular,' he added with a complacent smile, 'that the world should owe all its finest ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the body—a religion that will prevent deformity, that will refuse to multiply insanity, that will not propagate disease—a religion that is judged by its consequences in this world. Orthodox Christianity has taught, and still teaches, that in this world the difference between the good and the bad is that the bad enjoy ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... obvious advantages of surveying, as it were in a picture, the true beauty of virtue and deformity of vice, we may moreover learn from Plutarch, Nepos, Suetonius, and other biographers, this useful lesson, not too hastily, nor in the gross, to bestow either our praise or censure; since we shall ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... have liked to bring forward a miracle which she was acquainted with. Only she spoke with so much difficulty owing to the deformity of her mouth, that she had not yet been able to secure a turn. Just then, however, there was a pause, and drawing the wrap, which concealed the horror of her sore, slightly on one side, she profited by the opportunity ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... giant, moving with curling upraised tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way, reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like elephants—clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... movements, the conviction of having done or neglected a duty, the calm satisfaction of the virtuous mind, and the fierce or sullen remorse of the criminal, are associated with the insuppressible persuasion of liberty. Destroy this persuasion, and virtue is despoiled of its loveliness, vice of its deformity. But it cannot be destroyed. It is the voice of nature. The Creator has so formed us, that we cannot throw off from ourselves the sense of responsibility, nor regard our fellow creatures as unfit for praise or blame, ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,—an inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... warfare in which religion and science shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind—for justice against injustice—for right against wrong—for beauty against deformity—for goodness against vice—and the great warfare which has brought so many sufferings, shall bring to the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... nation seems to have been driven, by the long suppression of free thought and belief, added to the miseries brought about by the old regime, to take refuge in unrealities, and this has resulted in a kind of deformity of the national soul. It was a strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are oblivious, or nearly so, of all swelling, and the bones can be skiagraphed in the thinner parts of the body at present, say up to the elbow and the ankle, with very great accuracy. Thus, Figure 8 shows the deformity from an old fracture of the ulna (one of the bones of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... wished, he tells us in his preface, to retrieve the moral deformity of Lucretia Borgia by the beauty of the maternal sentiment; he wished, according to his own energetic expression, 'to place the mother in the monster.' Here let us make a distinction. I admire the tenderness which the most ferocious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... eyes, we see that Della was the taller and more graceful of the two. Her hair and complexion were rather dark than fair; long, dark eyelashes shaded eyes deep blue, dreamy and wondrous in expression. We never mind much a nose, unless it be ugly to a deformity, or a model for the sculptor. An Angelo would have thrilled at sight of Della's nose, and straightway wrought it into immortality, alto relievo. Her mouth and chin were as lovely and divinely rounded as any Madonna's. The shape of her head was ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... found sympathy to be as necessary as medical treatment for their ails. An interesting example of this was the case of Eliga, who was afflicted with an unsightly tumour on his back. This, in a land where any sort of deformity is looked upon with horror, caused the unfortunate man great unhappiness, besides depriving him of his titles and estates. His kind master and mistress had him examined by the surgeon of an English man-of-war that was in the harbour, and the opinion was given that an operation ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... graces which distinguished us as Christians; that being now deprived of all the fancied felicity which he enjoyed in the full exercise of all those vices, he said, he was at leisure to look upon the dark side of them, where he found all manner of deformity; and was now convinced, that virtue only makes a man truly wise, rich, and great, and preserves him in the way to a superior happiness in a future state; and in this, he said, they were more happy in their banishment, than all their enemies ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... finish the details with more precision, it was only substituting ornament for simplicity; and the endeavor to bring the proportions of the human figure nearer to nature, with the retention of its conventional type, only made its deformity greater, and showed how incompatible the Egyptian was with ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... do so to the complete extinction of the light of truth; but set aside his confirmations, return and view the proposition itself from your own rationality, and you will see its falsity in all its deformity. From all this it can be seen that man is able to abuse these two capacities, which he has from the Lord, to confirm evils and falsities of every kind. This no beast can do, because no beast enjoys these capacities. Consequently, a beast is born into all the order of its life, and ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... expands, the man begins to grow in greatness. But it is evident, if we accept this illustration as a fairly true one, that the chief point of importance is to explore no more persistently on one line than another: else the result must be a deformity. We all know how powerful is the majesty and personal dignity of a forest tree which has had air enough to breathe, and room for its widening roots, and inner vitality with which to accomplish its unceasing task. It obeys the perfect natural law of growth, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... habitations far below. There are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are seen, where 'want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted chimneys, and deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance. As Mr Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him there has let the light of day in on these things: not made or caused them. It was the journey's ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... impulse; you saw me feeble, suffering, oppressed, and you took pity on me. Now that your benevolence is satisfied, my deformity inspires you with contempt. I thought you were good, but you are not good; you have the instinct of kindness, but you are not kind. If you were really charitable you would continue to interest yourself in me for the very reason that ...
— The Story of a Cat • mile Gigault de La Bdollire
... horror rooted me to the spot. The servant was an old woman, thin and wrinkled and bent, a common deformity in people who have worked in the fields. I found her shaking a cooking utensil over a filthy sink. A dirty candle fluttered in her trembling hand; about her were pots, kettles, and dishes, the remains of dinner that a dog sniffed at, from ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... quite natural, and the scout complains of a great deal of pain at the middle of the thigh and thinks he felt something break when he fell. He cannot raise the injured leg. Carefully rip the trousers and the underclothing at the seam to above the painful point. When you have done this the deformity will indicate the location of the fracture. You must be very gentle now or you will do harm, but if one hand is put above where you think the {263} break occurred and the other below it and it is lifted gently you will find that there is ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... personal jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to is amazing to us of a more sensitive organization. I well remember the extreme difficulty I once had in breaking an Italian servant of the habit of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... exiled Bolingbroke's "Reflections upon Exile;" the retired Petrarch and Zimmerman's Essays on "Solitude;" the imprisoned Boethius's "Consolations of Philosophy;" the oppressed Pierius Valerianus's Catalogue of "Literary Calamities;" the deformed Hay's Essay on "Deformity;" the projecting De Foe's "Essays on Projects;" the liberal Shenstone's Poem ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His refrain consisted ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... have remained an absorbing study. Her sudden and awful bereavement had struck her strong and exceptional spiritual nature with the shattering force of the ball that crashes through muscle, bone, and nerves. In the latter case the wound may be mortal, or it may cause weakness and deformity. The wounded spirit must survive, although the effects of the wound may be even more serious and far- reaching—changing, developing, or warping character to a degree that even the most experienced cannot predict. Next to God, time ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... all the loafers in the plazas laughed and acted as if they would catch the cripples when dad got out of sight and rob the beggars. Dad thinks the way the people live is by dividing with beggars. A man who has a deformity, or a sore that you can see half a block away, seems to be considered rich here, like a man in America who owns stock in great corporations. These beggars pay more taxes than the dukes and ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... like that of a kennel-stream, for a long, long way. Beggars, indeed, started up at every point, when we stopped for a moment, and whenever a hill imposed a slower pace upon us; each village had its deformity or its infirmity, offering his wretched petition at the step of the carriage; and even a venerable, white-haired patriarch, the grandfather of all the beggars, seemed to grow up by the roadside, but was left behind ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... solitude of his own chamber, conscience resumed her sway, and no plausibility of pretence could conceal from himself that he was about to become that vilest of beings—a common murderer. There were moments even when the dread deed to which he had pledged himself appeared in such hideous deformity that he fain would have fled on the instant far from the influence of her who had incited him to its perpetration, but when the form of Matilda rose to his mental eye, remorse, conscience, every latent principle ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... some man who had evidently endeavored to wile away his time in prison by caricaturing his persecutors; and certainly he had succeeded in the attempt. Nothing more absurd than some of these pictures could be imagined; every possible deformity was ascribed to the originals, and the sketches were surrounded by pasquinades and quaint devices. Here and there might be found expressions of deeper and more fearful import, if indeed anything could be more fearful than the contrast between the ridiculous and such a dungeon. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... in the rocks the day before and was now going lame. Dressed fairly respectably in the universal blue, my unsought companion was of middle stature, strongly built, but so clumsily as to border almost on deformity, and to give all his movements the ungainly awkwardness of a left-handed, left-legged man. He walked with a limp, was suffering (like myself) with sore feet; if not that, it was something incomparably worse. Not for a moment throughout the day did he leave my side, the only ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... countenance and encouragement, and readily suspend their solitary research and study for the opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and objects of their pursuit. The cases in which society is voluntarily shunned or forsaken are as rare as the cases of congenital disease or deformity; and for every such instance there may generally be assigned some grave, if not sufficient, cause. Religious asceticism has, indeed, induced many persons, especially in the early Christian ages, to lead a solitary life; but the coenobites ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... extremely odd; he was low in stature; and this defect was enhanced by a distortion of the spine, so considerable as almost to amount to a hunch; his features, too, had all that sharpness and sickliness of hue which generally accompany deformity; he wore his hair, which was black as soot, in heavy neglected ringlets about his shoulders, and always without powder—a peculiarity in those days. There was something unpleasant, too, in the circumstance that he never ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... finally discarded the habit of sucking is so firmly established that the child will suck its thumb for many years after. This results in further disease and deformity to the growing mouth and throat, and also to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Romish faith of these times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance churches,—fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... talked to her during supper very rationally, with plain, good common-sense, but never with what the world calls wit; and Beauty daily discovered some valuable qualifications in the monster, till seeing him often had so accustomed her to his deformity, that, far from dreading the time of his visit, she would often look on her watch to see when it would be nine, for the Beast never missed coming at that hour. There was but one thing that gave Beauty any concern, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... to the avocat in a tone all silver, for he had that one gift of Heaven as recompense for his deformity, his long arms, big head, and short stature, a voice which gave you a shiver of delight and pain all at once. It had in it mystery and the incomprehensible. This drinking-song, hummed just above his breath, touched some antique memory in Monsieur Garen the avocat, and he nodded kindly at the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... miscreate, In masses lumped hideously, Wallowed the conger, the thorny skate, The lobster's grisly deformity; And, baring its teeth with cruel sheen, a ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... the previous evening. She was a lamplight beauty, I supposed. But her dress satisfied. It was a long indoor gown which indicated without indelicacy the natural lines of her slender figure, and she was innocent of the shocking vulgarity of the small waist, a common enough deformity at that time, although now, it is said, affected by third rate actresses and women of indifferent character only. The waist is an infallible index to the moral worth of a woman; very little of the latter survives the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... these they burn with desire towards them as they did in the world: wherefore they bargain with them; but when they are about to enjoy the bargain, the phantasy induced from heaven is taken away, and then those pretended maidens appear in their own deformity, monstrous and dark, to whom nevertheless they are compelled to cleave for a time: those harlots are called sirens. But if by such fascinations they do not suffer themselves to be draw away from that ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Then cast about and see and search diligently to find out all those burthens that came in by Kings, and remove them; and then will thy Commonwealth's Government arise from under the clods under which as yet it is buried and covered with deformity."—WINSTANLEY, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Astonishment, than anything else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a spontaneous combustion was an ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... the Perkins Institution for the Blind at Boston. He determined to try to get the child into the Institution and to attempt to educate her; her parents assented, and in October 1837 Laura entered the school. Though the loss of her eye-balls occasioned some deformity, she was otherwise a comely child and of a sensitive and affectionate nature; she had become familiar with the world about her, and was imitative in so far as she could follow the actions of others; but she was limited in her communication with others to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... he was, and hard at work on various MSS. in the intervals of sight-seeing, it is evident that to sit for his portrait was a new task which he did not 'fear to enter upon at present.' Nor need we be surprised. It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait. A man may be old, he may be ugly, he may be burdened with grave responsibilities to the nation, and that nation be at a crisis of its history; but none of these considerations, nor all ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... a microscope, its external deformity strikes us with disgust. It has six feet, two eyes, and a sort of sting, proboscis, or sucker, with which it pierces the skin, and sucks the blood. The skin of the louse is hard and transparent, with here and there several bristly hairs: at the end of each leg are two claws, by which it is ...
— The History of Insects • Unknown
... as ourselves, is to be judged of by our experience of that nature, and is therefore to be assumed to be variously imperfect, however eminent and admirable in some respects. And no one is to be called an imaginer of deformity, because he takes for granted that one who is Man has imperfections which were not known to those who compiled memorials of him. To impute to a person, without specific evidence, some definite frailty or fault, barely ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of middle height and erect carriage, had so vast a spread and depth of chest, development of the deltoid muscles so unusual, and length of arm so unnatural as to establish the effect at once of power and deformity; to which the yellow skin, high cheek-bones, small eyes, and the thin black moustaches, drooping long and perpendicular from each corner of the broken-toothed mouth, added an expression of cruelty so unmitigated that Amaryllis turned sick at the sight, closing her eyes ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... rent asunder which had in some measure concealed the deformity of Philip's despotism. The result was a powerful confederacy, among all who held it odious, for the overthrow of Granvelle, to whom they chose to attribute the king's conduct; thus bringing into practical result the sound principle ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... separate houses, and still existing, though in a somewhat changed and mutilated form, part of it being now occupied by the War Office—has sheltered many artists of fame under its roof. Here Jervas painted—the pupil of Kneller, and the admired of Pope, whose deformity the painter in his portrait of the poet did his best to mend and conceal; here lived mad Jack Astley, who made so prosperous a marriage with the rich Lady Duckenfield; and Nathaniel Hone, the Royal Academician, retaining on the premises a negress ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... deformity, are rarely known to exist among them: this is probably owing to the manner in which they are tended and nursed in infancy. It is not necessary that the mother should, as has been supposed, be guilty of the unnatural crime of murdering her decrepid or deformed offspring—the hardships they ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... might have gone by land; the third, that he had remained one whole day without doing any business of moment. Applying himself to an old man who was committing some vice: "Friend," said he, "old age has of itself blemishes enough; do not you add to it the deformity of vice." Speaking to a tribune, who was reputed a poisoner, and was very violent for the bringing in of a bill, in order to make a certain law: "Young man," cried he, "I know not which would be better, to drink what you mix, or confirm what you ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... began the clamour, which has continued till now. Those who had undertaken to oppose the ministry, having no grievance of greater magnitude, endeavoured to swell this decision into bulk, and distort it into deformity, and then held it out to terrify ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... globe he hasn't had a peek at. He has a vast knowledge of the arts. His real name nobody seems to know. He can make himself very likable to men and attractive to women. The sort of women he seeks do not mind his physical deformity. His face and his intellect draw them, and he is as cruel as a wolf. It never occurred to me until last night that men like me create his kind. But I don't understand him in this instance. A play like this, with all the future risks! After I get the wires moving he won't be able to stir ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... told him, "that isn't true. For one thing, not all of us who are classified mutants are true mutants. Almost any deformity or abnormality these days is called mutantism. It's a handy term to cover anyone who doesn't conform to the Terran ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... however, has nowise tamed, it has rather increased, his innate malignity and crookedness of disposition; education having of course but educed what was in him. Even his poetry is, for the most part, made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity; the proper music of his nature being to curse, its proper laughter to snarl. Schlegel finely compares his mind to a dark cave, into which the light of knowledge falling neither illuminates nor warms it, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... court, where he corrupts her mind and is about to triumph in her charms when he is summoned to quell a political disturbance. The princess, left languishing in a bower, is saved by her good Genius, who enables her to discern the true deformity of her betrayer and to escape to the castle of the good Alhahuza, and ultimately into the kingdom of Oozoff, where Ochihatou's magic has no power over her. During her stay there she listens to much political theorizing of a republican trend. ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness, and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his home—these ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers |
