"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Marianne, I weep and mourn to-day, From your house to our cottage-home the fever made its way; My father lies with ghastly face, and many a raving cry— Oh, would that Durand too might come, before ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... we landed. I could only creep along the path, holding on by the fence; for my feet were like leaden weights. My form bowed itself like an old man's. The fields, the trees, were not green, but ghastly. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... the door did not even shake to his stoutest kick. Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. We both ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... them: that was the trouble. The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them. They were too cheap. So nobody could have them. It's the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed. There's enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful. There's no miracle needed. I went ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Schofield, and as he bent to his work he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and its ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... to get back home to the old planet and the companionship of fellow creatures. He soon got over that feeling, but he says his first flight alone was a nightmare to him because of that dreadful sensation of ghastly loneliness." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not only dazed, but a pallor stole over his skin, the more ghastly in contrast with his black ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... ought to do? The thought hurt him, then lost edge, as if it had come in contact with a breastplate. Out of oneself! Impossible! Out into soundless, scentless, touchless, sightless space! The very idea was ghastly, futile! And touching there the bedrock of reality, the bottom of his Forsyte spirit, Soames rested for a moment. When one ceased, all ceased; it might go on, but there'd be nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... distant dot of intensely bright light, shed its wan glow over the ghastly scene. Dodeth wished the Moon were out; its much brighter light would ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Germana. Germinate gxermi. Gerund gerundio. Gesture gesto. Get (receive) ricevi. Get (procure) havigi. Get (with infinitive) igi, igxi. Get dirty malpurigxi. Get ready pretigi, pretigxi. Ghastly palega. Gherkin kukumeto. Ghost fantomo. Giant grandegulo. Gibbet pendigilo. Gibbous gxiba. Gibe moki. Giddiness kapturno. Giddy, to make kapturnigi. Gift donaco. Gift, to make a donaci. Gifted talenta. Gild orumi. Gill (fish) branko. Gilliflower ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... days the approach to London on all sides seems to have lain through serried files of gibbets, growing closer and more thronged as the distance from the city diminished, till they and their occupants arranged themselves in rows of ghastly and grinning sentinels along both sides ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Chigi palace the commotion assumed the aspect of a riot. The carriage had to stop. Elena leaned forward to look out, and her face emerging from the shadows and lighted up by the glare of the gas and the reflection of the sunset seemed of a ghastly whiteness, an almost icy pallor, reminding Andrea of some head he had seen before, he could not say where or ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... shut out the sight that pressed upon them. "I cannot get it out of my mind. I suppose my nerves and everything are wrong; all night long it seemed to be before me,—the blood on his forehead, the ghastly white face, the labouring breath. Oh, not like your father, who was good and old and peaceful, who was just taken away gently, led away,—but so young and so unprepared! Oh, so unprepared! What could God do with him, cut off ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau—but such countenances!—such a hideous expression of ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... given rein, will not only grow monstrous and despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock his efforts to free himself from this slavery. The victim of strong drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... certainly force a crisis. The sooner the crisis came the better, and amongst those for whom that was better Philip de Commines was not the least. With all his heart he loathed the part he was compelled to play, even while determined to play it to its ghastly end. But to some men, Commines amongst them, the irrevocable brings a drugging of the sensibilities. When that which must be done could not be undone he would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... visit the earth as a black dog, on another day as a raven, on still another day he would be heard in the distance roaring like a bull. He appeared sometimes as a white man in black clothes, and sometimes he became a black man in black clothes, when it was remarked that his voice was ghastly, that he wore no shoes, and that one of his feet was cloven. His stratagems were endless. For, in the opinion of divines, his cunning increased with his age; and having been studying for more than ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rector looked in, with a face so ghastly and drawn that she almost cried out in terror. His hair was white, and ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... that contraption, will you? If ever it started going off not one of us would live to tell the ghastly tale," called Will, as if really and truly alarmed, which, of course, he ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by those ghastly evils ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... after the terrible storm of 1905, when the great steamer Bay Queen went down with all on board, the exact spot of her sinking unknown even to this day. Then the whole ocean side of the Cape, from Race Point to Orham, was strewn with ghastly relics. But the Bay Queen met her fate in the winter season, amid a gale such as even the oldest residents could not remember. Now it was early summer; the night before had been a flat calm. There had been no wreck, ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the dead, And amazed he stares around. Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries, See the Furies arise! See the snakes that they rear How they hiss in their hair, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain And unburied remain Inglorious on the plain: Give the vengeance due To the valiant crew! Behold how they toss their torches on high, How ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... ship's crew; others in sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue markings of veins ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... for the Day, you lied for the Day, And woke the Day's red spleen, Monster, who asked God's aid Divine, Then strewed His seas with the ghastly mine; Not all the waters of all the Rhine Can ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the morning has climbed up the high eastern hill And the sunlight is dancing on ripple of rill, The coroner summons a jury and feigns An inquest of law o'er the ghastly remains. The verdict is heard with whoop and hurrah: "These moonshiners died at the hands of the law; Let all men beware," the coroner cried, "The murder ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... she paused, knowing she had made the most ghastly mistake, and not knowing how to remedy it. Daisy ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... overthrown; they were surrounded by shrieking black children, with pointed wings on their shoulders and horns on their foreheads, bound to stakes to represent the hosts of hell—a performance which they tried to make at once ghastly and droll. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... reserve of her injured husband, together with his ghastly paleness disturbed her, and her inquietude grew to painful anxiety as he maintained silence. At length he said "I have learned to love you truly and passionately, my wife, and now you show me how you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... amity. May from my bones a new Achilles rise, That shall infest the Trojan colonies With fire, and sword, and famine, when at length Time to our great attempts contributes strength; Our seas, our shores, our armies theirs oppose, And may our children be for ever foes!' 210 A ghastly paleness death's approach portends, Then trembling she the fatal pile ascends; Viewing the Trojan relics, she unsheath'd Aeneas' sword, not for that use bequeath'd: Then on the guilty bed she gently lays Herself, and softly thus lamenting prays; 'Dear relics! whilst ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... dare the dense murder that spewed from those ghastly machines. (Only those who have danced to its music can know what the mitrailleuse means.) But the bridge on the Aisne was a menace; our safety demanded its fall: "Engineers,—volunteers!" In a body, the Royals ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... cane bottom of an overturned chair. He took it out and laid it on the table. He saw his hat in a corner, stooped for it, missed it several times, and then got hold of it, and put it on. There was a little glass over the mantelpiece. A ghastly face with a torn collar was watching him furtively through it. He turned fiercely on the spy and found the face was his own. He turned up his coat and buttoned it. Then he went to the half-open door and ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Count Adrian's face was ghastly. Lord Cedric raised his sword and made a lunge at him. La Fosse was too quick for Cedric. He sprang between and parried the pass with astounding dexterity. The monk intended it for a finale stroke; but not so Cedric. He began a ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... "Ghastly! I can't stand it! But, all the same, it's a fearful corvee to keep it up when you're persecuted ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... stared. Surely the heavy breath had come more quickly a moment ago. It seemed an age between each rise and fall of the coverlet. There was a ghastly whistling sound ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... was by no means familiar to Cuthbert, it took only one glance to show him that this man was dying or dead. His face was ghastly and drawn, and his limbs were already growing rigid and motionless. The heavy charge of the pistol had done its work surely and fully: the bullet had passed through the spine, and had entered the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... has lands and gold, mother, The Queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold,— A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye, And famine upon ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... cast into the sea. In a few days the putrified body rose to the surface head upwards, as though the murdered man had come again to haunt his executioners and give them a further opportunity of gazing at the ghastly features of their victim.[11] The sight of his old friend emerging again terrified Ferdinand, and he became afflicted with a feeling of abiding horror which he sought to appease by having the body interred in a Christian burial-ground. But the spirit of his executed ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... die in eager strife Upon a well-fought field; Nor from the red wound poured their life Where cowering foemen yield. Death's ghastly shade was slowly cast Upon each manly brow, But calm and fearless to the ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... sound that escaped the doctor's lips. It was a prolonged sound, and uttered in a tone of exquisite distress. The white and ghastly face ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... travels. The old villain then catches what he can. Myself, I hardly believe he continues his brigandage. He appears wholly worn out. I gave his little son 20 paras to buy camel's flesh. The old freebooter grinned a ghastly smile. Walking in Ben Weleed quarters, I heard a great to-do, and went to see what it was, when I saw the old chief, Haj Ben Mousa Ettanee, standing over his young truant son, whilst with a thick stick the servant of the schoolmaster was belabouring the feet of the child. Never was a more ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in the place of contending theorists. Robespierre and Brissot were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to a logic of his own. He adopted simply the state of nature and the primitive contract, in which thousands of his ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... sword, and spurs, were laid on the coffin, and from her shaded window Albinia watched it borne between the files of soldiers with arms reversed; and the procession of officers whose bright array contrasted with the colonel's war-worn dress, ghastly cheek, and empty sleeve, tokens of the reality of war amid its pageantry, as all moved slowly away to the deep tones of the solemn Dead March, music well befitting the calm grandeur of the face she had seen, and leaving her heart throbbing with the deep exulting awe and pathos ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beams of the morning sun—and the slowly moving "relief detail" from the camp—came a weird half-resurrection of that ghastly field. Then it was that the long rays of sunlight, streaming away a mile beyond the battle line, pointed out the first harvest of the dead where the reserves had been posted. There they lay in heaps and piles, killed by solid shot or bursting shells that had ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... face of the cattleman Dave read the ghastly fear of his own soul. Doble was capable of terrible evil. His hatred, jealousy, and passion would work together to poison his mind. The corners of his brain had always been full of lust and obscenity. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... a wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly light ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... red and blue and yellow Blotting the fair skies! And the air, with noisome stenches, As from things that rot, Chokes the breather—exhalation From the infernal pot. And amid the thick-curled vapors Ghastly shapes I see Of dire diseases, Epimetheus, Launched on earth by thee. A horrid crew! Some lean and dwindled, Some with boils and blains Blistered, some with tumors swollen, And water in the veins; Some with ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... risen from a sick-bed, led the conspirators who seized Davie Rizzio, dragged him from his mistress's knees, to which he clung, and slew him pitilessly on the boards which, according to old tradition, still bear the stain of his blood. After that ghastly token, authentic or non- authentic, which would thrill the hearts of the young princesses as it has stirred many a youthful imagination, Darnley's armour and Mary's work-table, with its embroidery worked by her own hand, must ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... slow, uncertain steps, his hands clinging to the balustrade, his head so heavy that he scarce could bear its weight. The servants stood below in sorrowful amazement. They had never seen their master so agitated in his life before; they could scarcely believe that this ghastly being was the dignified and stately man who had left them but an hour before. Suddenly they started, for surely they heard a loud laugh from the study, but what a laugh!—so wild, so unearthly, that it sounded like the dreadful mirth of a madman!—Then ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... rate, he glanced down the area, and was a good deal astonished to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... a spectacle did they present! The cavalry, most of them dismounted, were mingled with the infantry, who dragged their feeble limbs along with difficulty; their shattered mail and tattered garments dripping with the salt ooze, showing through their rents many a bruise and ghastly wound; their bright arms soiled, their proud crests and banners gone, the baggage, artillery, all, in short, that constitutes the pride and panoply of glorious war, forever lost. Cortes, as he looked wistfully on ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... That I know. I will never forget that. He weighed only 195 pounds, but I am sure he had another couple of hundred tucked away somewhere. When I had finished counting a great variety and number of stars, it occurred to me that I had been in a ghastly railroad wreck, and that the engine and cars following had picked out my right knee as a nice soft place to pile up on. There was a feeling of great relief when I looked around and saw that the engineer of that train, Mr. E. H. Coy, had stopped ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... moor striped with sullen water courses, shagged with sedge, and yellow iris, and in the drier part with bilberries. For by this time it was four o'clock, and the summer sun, rising wanly, showed us all the ghastly scene. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes, Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell, Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell. For, as we stood there waiting on the strond, Behold! an huge great ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and charming by his warmth and boldness of color. His attempts to express the gay and mirthful, as for instance in the masquerade music of "Traviata" and the dance music of "Rigoletto," are dreary, ghastly, and saddening; while his ideas of tenderness are apt to take the form of mere sentimentality. Yet generalities fail in describing him, for occasionally he attains effects strong in their pathos, and artistically admirable; as, for example, the slow air for the heroine, and the dreamy song for ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... what people in books call 'stunned'. The illumination during the past few minutes had been so dazzling that my brain could not master it. I remember very clearly that I did not think about the ghastly failure of our scheme, or the German plans which had been insolently unfolded to me as to one dead to the world. I saw a single picture—an inn in a snowy valley (I saw it as a small place like Peter's cottage), a solitary girl, that smiling devil who ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... enough to cut off heads and arms at one blow. When this valorous exploit was done, he comes to me laughing, as a token of triumph, delivered me my sword again, with abundance of suprising gestures, laying it, along with the bleeding and ghastly head of the Indian, at ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... seen her purloin it. Then she would be a friend to him; did he forget her power? He questioned her on the uses she would make of a blood-stained linen rag. She told him she had her purposes, and he remembered her witch practices, the stories of the ghastly ingredients of her magic potions. He alluded to witchcraft, and she defied him again, then he called the guard; but when the soldiers' tread echoed in the corridor, she drew the cloth from a hidden panel in her bureau and flung it at him, with bitter words cursing him. And he departed ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Before him, crippled and ghastly in the last agony of life, lay the author of this diabolical outrage upon every ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Mr. Merrick recoiled. The face was seared with livid scars, the nose crushed to one side, the mouth crooked and set in a sneering grin. One eye was nearly closed and the other round and wide open. A more forbidding and ghastly countenance Mr. Merrick had never beheld and in his surprise ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... something, and he stopped, shuddering. It was the body of one of the slavers and presently he passed another. The sea was giving up its dead. He reached the schooner, glad to leave these ghastly objects behind him, and, with some difficulty, climbed aboard. The vessel had shipped much water, but she was not as great a wreck as he had expected, and he instantly descended to the cook's galley, where he had given ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... said the V. A. D. "Whenever I see it, I somehow feel my heart grow warm to the American people for the splendid way in which they have helped poor France, for, you know, in the first months of the war, the French hospitals were perfectly ghastly." ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... horror? Shall he not cry out, beg for his life, or fly to save it? Shall I not see the assassin dealing the deadly blow, and the defenseless wretch falling dead at his feet? Shall I not picture vividly in my mind the blood gushing from his wounds, his ghastly face, his groans, and ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the restaurant. The full horror of what had happened to Dr. Marks was just having its effect. He found himself shivering as though with a severe chill. Marks was the victim of something ghastly. He seemed to be trying to make sense, as though there was still a glimmer of intelligence behind the blank stare. But his words ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... away to look for the entrance to the lagoon. I was then aloft again, for the sake of the more extended view obtainable from the height of the topgallant yard; and as we swept past the reef, and I looked down upon it, I thought I had never seen a more ghastly place for a solitary human being to be cast away upon. It was composed, apparently, of nothing but coral, upon which the everlasting surf was gradually casting up a deposit of sand, which, when dry, the wind ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... notice, because it seems likely to have extensive effects in corrupting others: —we mean his taste for horrible and revolting subjects. We thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." He ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... burning curiosity and a deep sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call affection—still less, revenge or malice. I didn't remember my father as alive at all: the one thing I could recollect about him was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood that clotted it. It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth that alone pushed me on. This search became ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... divested of that malice prepense which constitutes the crime of murder! Happy the victims in whom life is not completely extinguished, who recover their feet, bind up their wounds, and undeterred by a ghastly experience, hazard in more encounters a fresh assassination of the heart. Such fortitude would have afforded a remedy to Dick Stanmore. "Wanted—a lady!" should have been the motto emblazoned on his banner if ever he turned ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... 'Isn't it ghastly? I've bought twenty; they're in our camp; but won't you have something to eat first? We've more than ten people can do here; and I've got a horse for you. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! You're a ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... "I suppose we can find out soon, for tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me," he said, with a rather ghastly smile, "for being well acquainted with my ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... monsters of the deep; palpitating masses of pulp! One lay rocking, already as large as a football with streamers of ooze hanging from it, and squirting a black inky fluid. Others were rods of red jelly-pulp, already as large as lead pencils, quivering, twitching. Disease germs, these ghastly things, enlarging from the invisibility ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... at the breast by a medallion of gold and topaz. He was a typical Egyptian, but thinner of lip and severer of countenance than the laity. The wooden dolls tumbled about by the children of the realm were not more hairless than he. His high, narrow head was ghastly in ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... dying out fast on the peaks around, and they ceased to flash and glow, to become pale and grey, and then ghastly, cold and strange, as the little party sat enjoying the simple meal and the calm and rest of the peaceful scene. Everything around was so still that there was hardly a murmur in the pines; only the hushed roar of the restless river, but subdued now, for its waters ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... the light. The two went after him into a silent house, where everybody slept. The light that had burned for him all night was sick like a guilty thing in the eye of day, and all that had been prepared for his repose was ghastly to him in the hour of awaking, as if prepared not for sleep but for death. His heart was sick like the watch-light, and life flickered within him with disgust and disappointment. For why had he been born, if this were all?—for all was vanity. The ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... use of fire-arms. I noticed that these people have slightly fairer complexions than the natives of Hudson's Bay, and the women are somewhat more elaborately tattooed, despite which they are quite comely. The children are all remarkably pretty, but the men have a ghastly look from wearing wooden goggles to guard against snow blindness, which makes the skin around the eyes, where protected by the goggles, several shades lighter than the rest of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... nobody more quickly than Jane Hubbard—now observed that the white face of the man on the stool had grown whiter still. His eyes gazed out glassily from under his damp brow. He looked like a man who was seeing some ghastly sight. The audience sympathised with him. They felt like ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... is so ghastly and abnormal that I must own it puts me quite off my balance; but the thought did occur to me that possibly the—well, the person who set the trap might have come to see the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... and sudden that it scarcely seemed real to John, but there were the dead bodies lying ghastly in the road, and there stood Julie, as pale as death, but not trembling. The leader of the Uhlans pushed his helmet back a little from his forehead, and looked down at John, who had been disarmed but who stood erect ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ghastly livid hue on the strongly-marked features of the sleeper, rendered sharp and haggard by disease and his penurious habits; she could just distinguish through the gloom the spectre-like form of the invalid, and the long bony attenuated hands which grasped, from time to time, the curtains and bedclothes, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... except when occasionally he coughed, and the others seemed content to let him enjoy himself in his own way. His eyes had a singular brightness, and when he laughed his white teeth and rather drawn mouth gave him almost a ghastly appearance. He seemed as much of an odd number as Tom himself, but not in the same way, for Tom was matter-of-fact and stolid, and this little gnome of a scout seemed all ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... chieftain, leading beside it their pinioned captive. As they approached to the little rude hamlet where they dwelt, a motley crowd of old men, women, and children, came forth to welcome their return; but when they beheld the ghastly body of their late chief, and the drooping looks of the warriors, their joyful cries were exchanged for wails of lamentation, and they tore their hair, and expressed the most violent emotions of grief. They wept over the bleeding corpse of the victim, while they derided and buffeted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... requisition for the benefit of many of the people as well as the animals of the neighborhood. Never had his skill been needed more than now, for poor Tiepoletta had not recovered consciousness, and her rigidity and the ghastly pallor which had overspread her features seemed to indicate that she had ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... sending British ships to lay Constantinople under their guns, was a splendid conception worthy the military imagination of the daring ages when the British Empire was built and the days of the Spanish Main, but the only criterion in the ghastly business ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... water was visible, which I quickly baled into the canvas bags we had brought for the purpose. The bottom of the hole was filled in with dead sticks, leaves, the rotting bodies of birds and lizards, bones of rats and dingoes. Into this ghastly mass of filth I sunk up to my middle, and never shall I forget the awful odour that arose as my feet stirred up the mess. Nevertheless water was there, and thankful I was to find it, even to drink it as it was. After half an hour's work in this stinking pit, sick from the combination of smells—distinguishable ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... later Mrs. Lloyd was startled by a hasty rap at the door, and on opening it beheld her husband supported between two men, his face ghastly pale, and stained with blood from a wound on his forehead. She was a brave woman, and although her heart almost stood still with agonised apprehension, she did not lose control of herself for an instant. Directing Mr. Lloyd to be carried into the parlour and laid gently upon the sofa, ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... irresponsible, but up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Hog-Lane, St. Giles. He has shown us Bridewell, Bedlam, and the Fleet Prison. Through a window in one print we see the houses on old London Bridge; in another it is Temple Bar, surmounted by the blackened and ghastly relics of Jacobite traitors. He takes us to a cock-fight in Bird Cage Walk, to a dissection in Surgeons' Hall. He gives us reception-rooms in Arlington Street, counting-houses in St. Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... ride, then," he offered. "We can cache more stuff and I'll ride Sally." He grunted and twisted as the pain cut him. He looked ghastly. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... moved to pronounce his name, but some swift intuitive warning restrained the utterance. Suddenly a new horror, a ghastly possibility, thrust itself for the first time before her, and she felt as though some hand of ice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... chafing not a little, an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its perfect work. It was on the night of September 17th that the dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street. This ghastly reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the Liberator continued to take a lively interest in him, "was made in real workmanship style, of maple joist five inches through, eight or nine feet high, for the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the whales, And feel the churned sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails! Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea-unicorn, And send him foiled and bellowing back, for all his ivory horn; To leave the subtle sworder-fish of bony blade forlorn; And for the ghastly-grinning shark, to laugh his jaws to scorn: To leap down on the kraken's back, where 'mid Norwegian isles He lies, a lubber anchorage for sudden shallowed miles— Till, snorting like an under-sea volcano, off he rolls; Meanwhile ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... remind me, there are no kings in Radstowe. There's not even,' she added with a mocking smile which made her face gay in a ghastly way, 'not even a foreign Count who would turn out an impostor. Rose would do very well there, too. An imitation foreign Count with a black moustache and no money! She would be magnificent and tragic. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... on the turf, Paul gazed anxiously into his face. The eyes were closed; the lips ghastly blue; the heart ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion, the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... But if you do, you'll find me out! I'll tell you! I won't be able to conceal it! You'll know the truth about me! You've said all this was mysterious—for your own sake, let it stay so! You needn't think all truths are beautiful, and the truth about me is the most ghastly in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bare during full daylight, mingled their summits with the jasper tints of the sky; at their base ran a sea of amethyst. Not less lovely was the sunset, but after a quarter of an hour its beauty faded, and the wilderness of white crags and pinnacles was naked and ghastly under the moon. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... "grant, then, that there is such Scriptural warrant; I would nevertheless know that the existence of purgatory was wholly incompatible with the reign of an infinite God of love. And, knowing that, I have ceased to extort gifts of money from the ignorance of the living and the ghastly terrors of the dying—" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... had been sitting by the patient, but now that he could do no more for him he had moved to the fire; and they had taken the ghastly, half-emptied medicine bottles from the table by the bedside, and had spread it with a fair linen cloth, and had set out the silver vessels of the Supper of the Lord. The old man had been "wandering" somewhat during ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus we mourn the blight Of Virgin-Beauty, and endowments rare In their glad hours of promise.—O! when Age Drops, like the o'er-blown, faded rose, tho' dear Its long known worth, no ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... deepest shade; that on her right, though much lower, took the whole blaze of the midnight moon. Great festoons of live and purple sea-weed hung from it, shading dark cracks and crevices, fit haunts for all the goblins of the sea. On her left hand, the peaks of the rock frowned down ghastly black; on her right hand, far aloft, the downs slept ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... went up from the ranks of the Hillmen, and some of them would have rushed to accept the ghastly challenge. But the Chief held them back sternly. Then he himself, half a head taller than all but one or two of his followers, with magnificent chest and shoulders, and a dark, lionlike mane thick-streaked with grey, strode out three or four paces to the front and stood leaning on his ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... attention as the hours went by. He saw the gathering of armaments—the horizon tinged by the gathering war-vessels of the air—the advance, the sudden storm of battle, the gigantic destruction from these vast engines of power of which he had learned nothing but their ghastly potentialities. Or he saw the advance of this desperate garrison, dispersing this way and that for their war upon the world—silent vessels, moving in the clouds, to Rome, to London, to Paris and Versailles, each capable of obliterating a city. Or he saw, again, the submission of the world to the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, it was not reasonable, it was out of drawing that her good boys, her precious boys trained to be happy and help the world, to live useful, peaceful lives, should be snatched from home, here in America, and pitched into the ghastly struggle of Europe. Push back the ocean as she might, the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... agreed with his friend. "I like an expedition, Charlie, if there is fighting to be done; but I don't want to have anything more to do with surprises. However, the cavalry had a good deal more to do with it than we had; but, as you say, it was a ghastly business. The only comfort is they began it, and have been robbing the peasants and destroying ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... taking a gold coin from her little bag, but at that very moment a heavy blow, as if dealt by a fist, resounded on the door. And Norine turned ghastly pale, for she had recognized Alexandre's brutal knock. What could she do? If she did not open the door, the bandit would go on knocking, and raise a scandal. She was obliged to open it, but things did not take the violent tragical turn which she had feared. Surprised at seeing a lady there, Alexandre ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... have written them! There is neither the same boldness of design, nor mastery of execution in Johnson. In the one, the spark of genius seems to have met with its congenial matter: the shaft is sped; the forked lightning dresses up the face of nature in ghastly smiles, and the loud thunder rolls far away from the ruin that is made. Dr. Johnson's style, on the contrary, resembles rather the rumbling of mimic thunder at one of our theatres; and the light he throws ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is dark with woe, Tears have left ghastly traces there, Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow Could quench thy ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... shark at the bottom of the sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the perfumed fop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle through his dainty eyeglass, the prospect swims in blood and glares with the ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and he shudders with sickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dying panorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit, forever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... reached the middle of the frozen stream, which was covered with ghastly forms, when Captain Rose suddenly clasped his hand to his side and uttered ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... as his predecessor did. Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do? for when, by wandering about, they have worn out both their health and their clothes, and are tattered, and look ghastly, men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... one it would be impossible to forget. He must bear with him this memory, as a man who has committed a murder must bear with him the memory of his victim's ghastly face. ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... sound of sleigh-bells on the quiet English Quay made itself heard through the double windows. There was a clang of many tones, and the horses pulled up with a jerk. The color left Catrina's face quite suddenly, as if wiped away, leaving her ghastly. She was going to see ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry; but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed his glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along, barging into everything—it was blowing half a gale—and once I fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up and got him into the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and his condemnation. Over the very bridge where the heads of his adherents, exposed to view, held out a fearful picture of the fate which had threatened himself, he now made his triumphal entry; and to remove these ghastly objects was his first care. The exiles again took possession of their properties, without thinking of recompensing for the purchase money the present possessors, who had mostly taken to flight. Even though they had received a price for their estates, they seized ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... up I saw that Browne was at the helm, while Max was sleeping at my side. On perceiving that I was awake, Browne, from whom the exclamation had proceeded, pointed to something in the water, just astern. Following the direction of his finger with my eye, I saw, just beneath the surface, a large ghastly-looking white shark, gliding stealthily along, and apparently following the boat. Browne said that he had first noticed it about half an hour before, since which time it had steadily followed us, occasionally making a leisurely circuit round the boat, and then ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... in the lake, way out, beyond the piled ice along the shore. It would be ghastly cold to drop ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... were all drawn up on parade; before them were placed, in a ghastly heap, the bodies of their late commanders, to which Jung pointed, as he assured the army that it would find in him all that it had ever found in them, and he consoled many of the officers in a great measure for ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it was ignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on that history, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnant the destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux, which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fated house. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror is that history; ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... this time were very dark, and at several points we could see burning farm homesteads and villages, which to the thoughtful mind denoted the awful destruction and suffering envolved by the ghastly outrage upon humanity, being ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... seemed ghastly; and his refusal upon any persuasion to see a doctor quite heathenish, and a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his remark; it seemed unnecessary, and each was busy with his own thoughts. What did the next few days hold in store for the world, for England, for him? The ghastly, haunting fear that possibly they held nothing for England gnawed at men's hearts. It would be incredible, inconceivable; but impossible things had happened before. Many must have felt that fear, but to none can it have been quite so personal, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... her to hide the ghastly faintness that was coming over him. "I—I oughtn't to have tried to keep you, when I did," ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... that after all I managed to stave off the smash with sufficient approach to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business went on. You must understand that the scheme of the test he was applying to me was, I gathered, a homeward passage—the sort of passage I would not wish to my bitterest enemy. That imaginary ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... the executioner, whose arm became almost powerless; the affrighted man struck the blow on the part directed, but though, it is hoped, it destroyed all sensation, the head was not severed, but fell back on the shoulders, exhibiting a ghastly sight. Two more strokes of the axe were requisite to complete the work. Then, the head having been received in a piece of scarlet cloth, the lifeless remains of the true, and noble hearted soldier were deposited in a coffin, and delivered ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... prairie was lit up like a theatre during the grand scene in a spectacle. We could see the guerrilleros standing by their horses, in cordon across the plain; we could distinguish their arms and equipments—even the buttons upon their jackets! With their faces rendered ghastly under the glare, and their bodies magnified to gigantic proportions, they presented to our eyes a wild and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... observed the sergeant, as Stingaree, ghastly enough beneath his blood and dust, rolled over on his back once more, and lay effectively with closed eyes. Even the ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... dogs; until, through an opening in the thicket, he could see, at a distance of about forty paces, an enormous hyena, in the most wonderful state of excitement; dancing round a lamb just killed, and uttering, from time to time, the ghastly hysterical laughter which had pealed ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was brought home to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans—like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing all their other beaux—did once occasionally say, when the world assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... on the bare ground. They had been refused lodging in the workhouse, and were going to pass the night in that situation. As he came up to them, coarse jests, and snatches of low drinking-songs, ghastly as the laughter of lost spirits in the pit, mingled with the feeble wailings of some child of shame. The vicar recollected how he had seen the same sight at the door of Kensington Workhouse, walking home one night in company with Luke Smith; and how, too, he had commented ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... boast was that, if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue. You did not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens. You have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution. You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and Twenty-third Street. But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing wail, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... parents. On Hamish the Reverend Mr. Tyrie had bestowed instructions when he was occasionally thrown in his way; and if the seed fell among the brambles and thorns of a wild and uncultivated disposition, it had not yet been entirely checked or destroyed. There was something so ghastly in the present expression of the youth's features that the good man was tempted to go down to the hovel, and inquire whether any distress had befallen the inhabitants, in which his presence might be consoling ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... look strangely?" There was a feeble effort to awaken a smile, which only gave her face a ghastly expression. ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... straight towards that oaken beam, A trampled pathway ran; A ghastly shape was swinging there— ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... second the hunchback seemed to hesitate. He stood in awesome fear of Gian Maria, of whose cruelties some ghastly tales were told. But in greater fear he stood of the eternal damnation he might earn did he break the oath he had plighted not to ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... the ghastly remains fearful each instant that I should find the dainty skull that would shatter my happiness for life; but though I searched diligently, picking up every one of the twenty-odd skulls, I found none that was the skull of a creature but slightly removed from the ape. Hope, then, ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
