"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be saluted, and speak with intervals of musettes on the organ? It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite as odd and grotesque a thing ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Spaniard or Greek. He wore a species of caftan, a silk bonnet, and the extremities of his breeches were concealed in a pair of wide boots. In his left hand he held a parasol, and in his right the end of a cord, to which was attached a graceful Albanian greyhound.... Cagliostro saluted this grotesque being, who bowed slightly, but with satisfied dignity. 'You do not reside in Messina, signor?' he said in Sicilian, but with a marked foreign accent. Cagliostro replied that he was tarrying for a few days, and they began to converse on the beauty of the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... Kingdom, how much more would the misuse of the same food in a semi-tropical climate like Australia be disapproved of! Indeed, I am perfectly certain, that were those who have given attention to food and dietetics in possession of the facts, they would unhesitatingly condemn the grotesque inversion of food-habits at present in vogue throughout Australia. There is one very important matter which unquestionably requires to have special attention drawn to it. I refer to the customary Australian mid-day meal. Strange to say, all through the hot season, as well as the rest ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... vegetables: their guns supplied them with an abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... way I discovered many little dead birds, and the farther I went the more I found. Among the low bushes were also many old rabihorcados, dead and dry. Some were twisted among the network of branches, and several were hanging in limp, grotesque, horribly suggestive attitudes of death. Manuel had all of the Indian's leaning toward the mystical, and he believed the rabihorcados had destroyed themselves. Starved they may very well have been, but to me the gales of that wind-swept, ocean desert accounted for the hanging rabihorcados. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... was of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern methods; and here and there stood evidences ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... presented of the Irish priest as a money-grabbing martinet, whom his flock regard with mingled sentiments of detestation and fear, is a caricature as libellous as it is grotesque. Even the high standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... is the fine art debased in the temples, in these ponderous monuments of their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertisements in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue canal strung with lakes through its sand is very ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... singing the first verse, "I ac' monkey moshuns," the one in the middle would screw up his face and hump his shoulders in the most grotesque ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge? Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the right of partiality, of limitation, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... least subjected to anything above them,—academics, artists, litterateurs, strong-minded women, 'debating' youths, Scotchmen of the phrenological grade, and Irishmen of the young-Ireland school."[164] There are very many beside this grotesque group, who exclaim, with one of his warmest admirers, "Carlyle is my religion!" There are others again who say gratefully what John Sterling wrote him in his last brief letter, "Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... table with a lamp on it, surrounded by a circle of children, or of nephews and nieces, who nudge each other and point to their father or uncle, whispering, "Hush—he's asleep;"—and laughing at the grotesque expression that sleep has given ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... himself, boasting and throwing out his chest. "I'd like to have the chance to show what I can do," he declared. A thought that had been in his mind on the winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler put the name of Beaut upon him came back and he walked up and down before the woman making grotesque motions with his hands as Cracked McGregor had walked up and down ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... fell from her hand, and the omelette rolled, a grotesque mass, upon the carpet. She swayed, dizzily, raising one hand to her brow, but had recovered herself even as Leroux sprang forward ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... a great rock jutted out above the lake, that same barren rock wherein I had sat the day I discovered this cataract; now as I viewed this rock I was struck by its grotesque shape and then, all at once, I saw it was hatefully like to a shrivelled head—there were the fleshless jaws, the shrunken nose and great, hollow eye-socket. And now even as I stared at the thing my companion spied it also, for I felt ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of this anti-climax to martyrdom was too grotesque. Eileen burst into a peal of laughter, which was taken by her mother as a tribute to her lively vituperation. Decidedly, life was deliciously odd. Suddenly she remembered her posted letter to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... time referring to my planisphere, endeavored to distinguish the various constellations. I think I have before observed that our garden was on a terrace, and lay open to the road. One night, some country people passing very late, saw me in a most grotesque habit, busily employed in these observations: the light, which struck directly on the planisphere, proceeding from a cause they could not divine (the candle being concealed by the sides of the pail), the four stakes supporting a large paper, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... consists in covering the whole tusk with a succession of boldly carved grotesque figures—human, animal, and symbolic—giving the tusk a rich embroidered-like look, the thick ends being finished off with a suitable diamond pattern belt and the tip finished with an equally appropriate series of carvings ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... is most beautiful as well. You are, in effect, at the bottom of the ocean—or rather, at the bottom of many oceans in one. No light comes to you except through the grottos about you—grottos haunted by weird forms of the deep, from graceful to grotesque, from almost colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and even misleading. And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicago was a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension to represent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the United States being obviously Indianapolis.... The great towns love thus to affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles the gamboling of young tigers—it is half playful and half ferocious. For myself, I have to say that my heart was ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... for the future, it is absolutely necessary that these funds should be utilized again for the advancement of learning. Why should not a fellowship be made into a career for life, beginning with little, but rising like the incomes of other professions? Why should the grotesque condition of celibacy be imposed on a fellowship, instead of the really salutary condition of—No work, no pay? Why should not some special literary or scientific work be assigned to each fellow, whether resident in Oxford or sent abroad on scientific missions? Why, instead ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... seemed to be a plumber's wooden triangle. This preliminary operation having been completed, there then began a regular riot all over the ship. The yards were suddenly manned with red devils, black monkeys, and every kind of grotesque monster, while the whole ship's company, officers and men promiscuously mingled, danced the cancan upon deck. In order that the warmth of the day should not make us forget that we had arrived in his dominions, the Arctic father had stationed certain ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... but if at last a man snatched his hand from Satan, and prayed to the Lord Jesus, he went directly, took the book, found the name, and passed the "red hand" over the page; on seeing which Satan would stamp and cry. He gave very grotesque descriptions of the evil spirit's mortification, and always ended by bestowing on him a hearty kick. From seeing the effect, in point of watchfulness, prayer, and zeal, produced on this young Christian by such continual realization of the presence of the great tempter, I have ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... the trees stalked the giant Abyssinian, and the shadows and torchlight distorted him to grotesque proportions. He walked as if his weight was nothing; yet on his great shoulders he bore a half-grown ox, its feet hobbled, its tongue hanging from its panting mouth. Straight to the fire he stepped and cast his burden down, turning again without a word and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... IV. took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... spoke his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... fuel to the fire of my unrest. My wearied body and overstrained mind awakened all my imagination into preternatural activity. Ideas, visions, almost inspirations, floated before it with startling vividness. Most of them were grotesque enough, some were ghastly, some recalled thoughts and sensations that had for years been buried in the debris of my past life. But, behind and above them all, hovered the shape of that awful woman, and through them gleamed the memory of her entrancing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... controversies, menus, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. .. Nor must there be omitted another strange ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... difficult by wives who wouldn't allow them the use of the living female model and who made scenes if they encountered on the staircase such sources of inspiration. These ladies struck him as vulgar and odious persons, with whom it seemed grotesque that Julia should have anything in common. Of course she was not his wife yet, and of course if she were he should have washed his hands of every form of activity requiring the services of the sitter; but even these qualifications left him with a power to wince at the way in ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... from Mother has more power to calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how can he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of anything but ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... privileges; that at the same time they brought her great fame and influence; that she was at times haunted by doubts whether she ever really saw them; and, lastly, that her biographers have given them a more grotesque and materialistic character than is justified ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Sunday afternoon. Bluebell was on her way to the Maples, and had not proceeded far when she observed a Robinson Crusoe-looking figure in one of those grotesque fur caps and impossible hooded blankets that the fashionable Briton in Canada so fondly affects. She was speculating idly upon ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... p. 241). Probably the sculptures were like many still to be seen in the temples of that date in Southern India, where the base of the pillar is elaborately carved with grotesque figures of elephants, horses, ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... Generally these beasts frequent thin brush country; but I have three or four times seen them quite out in the open flat plains, feeding with the hartebeeste and zebra. They are about the size of our ordinary deer, are delicately fashioned, and can utter the most incongruously grotesque of noises by way ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... which is heard to play in this cheerful fashion, while at the same time we know that discomfiture is cruelly harrying it: that its inmost feelings are wounded, and that worse is in store for it, affects the contemplative mind with an inexpressibly grotesque commiseration. Do but listen to this one, which is the joint corporate voice of the men of Hillford. Outgeneraled, plundered, turned to ridicule, it thumps with unabated briskness. Here indeed might Sentimentalism shed a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be seen by the musicians, but could hear them at her ease. At length, enchanted at a piece which they had just played, she abruptly thrust her head beyond the curtains, and cried out, "Mort diable! but they sing delightfully!" At this grotesque sight, the Italians, and particularly the castrati, who are not the bravest men in the world, were so frightened that they were ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... the bottom and hung over his feet like huge bags, his long, thin, arms showed, half way to his elbows, in a coat that was too small to button about even his narrow chest. That boy never missed his lessons, though, but when he learned them no one ever knew for he seemed to be always drawing grotesque figures and funny faces on his slate or whittling slyly on some curious toy when the teacher's back was turned. He had no particular chum or crony. He was never a leader but dared to follow the boldest. To the little boys and girls he was a hero; to ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... of the newest style, the varnished panels of which reflect the whole moving panorama of the landscape, and show a picture, likewise, of our friend, with his visage broadened, so that his meditative smile is transformed to grotesque merriment. Within, sits a youth, fresh as the summer morn, and beside him a young lady in white, with white gloves upon her slender bands, and a white veil flowing down over her face. But methinks her blushing cheek burns ...
— The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... these treacherous invaders is absolutely touching in the light of our subsequent knowledge. They reared no sacred temples, nor did they seem to worship idols, and yet some few antiquities have been preserved which would seem to indicate that the natives possessed grotesque images, half human and half animal, like Chinese gods in effect. These were wrought so rudely out of stone as hardly to convey any fixed idea; vague and imperfect, it is not safe to define them as idolatrous images. They might ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the vigour and audacity of the Mantis will lead it. They include the large grey cricket (Pachytylus cinerascens, Fab.), which is larger than the creature which devours it; the white-faced Decticus, armed with powerful mandibles from which it is wise to guard one's fingers; the grotesque Truxalis, wearing a pyramidal mitre on its head; and the Ephippigera of the vineyards, which clashes its cymbals and carries a sabre at the end of its barrel-shaped abdomen. To this assortment of disobliging creatures let us add two horrors: the silky Epeirus, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... might easily be rendered impregnable; it commands both the town and harbour. The place itself deserves little notice; the houses are mean, and interspersed with negro huts, but there is one fine church, with several tolerable paintings in it. One struck me as especially grotesque, although I had often seen queer things in Roman Catholic churches in Europe. It was a representation of Hell, with Old Nicholas, under the guise of a dragon, entertaining himself with the soul of an unfortunate heretic in his claws, who certainly ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... moment the big doors of the shed were thrown open, and Mr. Sharp came in. He started back in astonishment at the sight of the three grotesque figures, their faces black with the soot, and their clothes covered with sawdust and ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... up with Italians, is a painful necessity in order that the people of America may be enabled accurately to measure the fatherland traditions and the fixed mental attitude of Italians generally toward our song birds. I shall now hold a mirror up to Italian nature. If the image is either hideous or grotesque, the fault will not be mine. I specially commend the picture to the notice of American game wardens and judges on ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... discarded for ever all the old tales of sorcery and witchcraft, and communion with the devil. They said there were no such horrid, unnatural, and disgusting beings as the incubi and succubi, and the innumerable grotesque imps that men had believed in for so many ages. Man was not surrounded with enemies like these, but with myriads of beautiful and beneficent beings, all anxious to do him service. The air was peopled with sylphs, the water with undines ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... the principles peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm with jerseys ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... charge of the stupendous task of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The romantic poet lost his head. Wine-inspired orations that delighted his guests, portrait busts of himself in every town, grotesque catalogues of campaigns against unheard-of negro tribes inscribed even on the venerable pyramids did not accord with the traditions of Rome. Octavian cut his career short, and in deep chagrin Gallus ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic storm! She set him off upon his own scenery, to the destruction of his laborious English, as he dwelt on the glories of his beloved rocks rent by fierce sea winds and waves into fantastic, grotesque, or lovely shapes, with fiords of exquisite blue sea between, the variety of which had been to him as the gentle foliage of tamer countries. Not a tree stood near the 'town' of Ballymakilty, but the wild crags, the sparkling waters, the broad open hills, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fancy, be transformed Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. The Zephyrs, fanning, as they passed, their wings, Lacked not for love fair objects whom they wooed With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque, Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age, From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth In the low vale, or on steep mountain side; And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard; These were the lurking ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... being set about two thirds up, instead of at half the height of the head. But his manner of work is always right; and his tragic power, though rarely developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great as his grotesque power. ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... whiteness, showing mistily, was the snowy flock itself. Sheep grazed in groups, the tan shaded slope in faint colouring beneath them. Here and there a mother turned her head to call back anxiously for the bleating lambkin lost behind the white curtain; and, dim and grotesque, the awkward strayling would come gamboling into sight. Near by on a little hillock, a single sheep stood with its head thrown up, a ghostly lookout. The hidden sun made the haze faintly luminous about this wandering flock of cloudland. We were not the first to move ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... pretty picture that night lighted by pumpkin Jack o' Lanterns in which electric bulbs had been hidden, and by grotesque paper lanterns representing bats, owls and all sorts of flying nocturnal creatures. The side walls had been covered with gorgeous autumn foliage, palms and potted rubber plants stood all about, and last, but by no means least, there was a long table laden with goodies and more pumpkin decorations. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... reality there are, not a great way off. These, or something closely resembling them. No satyrs could show in more grotesque guise than the forms at that moment moving up to the wall, on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... men thereupon witnessed a feat that was not only deadly in its precision but oddly grotesque. Cunningham's right hand flew out with the sinister quickness of a cobra's strike, and he had Flint's brawny wrist in grip. He danced about, twisted and lurched until he came to an abrupt stop behind Flint's back. Flint's mouth began to bend at ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... l'Encuerado. When he caught sight of us, the Indian raised a loud "Hiou! hiou!" Waving his hat in the air, he threw upon the ground some dark object, which fell heavily on the turf, and then he began dancing. We roared with laughter at his grotesque steps, and Lucien ran towards the Mistec, who, after his dance, was acting the acrobat ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected: 'He shall be able ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature. I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet—if the contradiction is credible—I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... towers, old belfries, old crosses, slender spires innumerable, rose up amid a world of quaint gables and angular roofs. Story above story sprang those curious dwellings; irregular yet homogeneous; dear to the painter's and the poet's eye; elaborate in ornament; grotesque in design; well suited to the climate, and admirably adapted to the wants and comforts of the inhabitants; picturesque like the age itself, like its costume, its manners, its literature. All these characteristic beauties and peculiarities are now utterly gone. All the old picturesque ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting in and out and smothering ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels are the blossoms of the absurd tree! How excessively grotesque to tie all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again! Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this could be devised—if symbolism is to be indulged ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... slightly bewildered by something in her attitude, sighed with relief, and then turned with the grotesque resemblance of a smile in his face to greet Forel, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... mountain-green, containing long crystals of vitreous feldspar, appears exposed. It is the real porphyrschiefer of Werner; and it would be difficult to distinguish, in a collection of stones, the phonolite of Parapara from that of Bilin, in Bohemia. It does not, however, here form rocks in grotesque shapes, but little hills covered with tabular blocks, large plates extremely sonorous, translucid on the edges, and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... contributed of its produce to the pot-au-feu. An old black cat was sitting as close to the fire as he could without singeing his whiskers, and gravely watching the simmering pot with longing eyes. His ears had been closely cropped, and he had not a vestige of a tail, so that he looked like one of those grotesque Japanese chimeras that everybody is familiar with. Upon the table, near at hand, a white plate, a tin drinking cup, and a china dish, bearing the family arms stamped in blue, were neatly arranged, evidently in readiness for somebody's supper. For a long time the cat remained perfectly ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... collapsed in her chair, a slim, gray-faced girl with the rouge giving a grotesque vitality to her bloodless cheeks. She got up very calmly and gave him the cablegram. Then she fainted in a ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... crashing roof, and clatt'ring grate, And hurling wall, and falling spire, Mingle in jarring din and ruin dire. Wild ruin scours the works of men; Their motly fragments strew the plain. E'en in the desert's pathless waste, Uncouth destruction marks the blast: And hollow caves whose secret pride, Grotesque and grand, was never ey'd By mortal man, abide its drift, Of many a goodly pillar reft. Fierce whirling mounts the desert sand, And threats aloft the peopl'd land. The great expanded ocean, heaving ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... materials for romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this kind?" And we answer—"Yes!" Every foot of soil is with us worked up: nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true, gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they live under clipped hedges, and repose in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... grass, was on his hands and knees, searching. He accomplished a complete circuit of the body, his round-shouldered, stooping figure making grotesque, elephantine shadows under the light of the torch as he moved about slowly, not trusting his eyes, but feeling with his hands every inch ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... annual of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... his shoulder. "Steady, Randall," he muttered. "They're terrible enough, God knows—but remember we must seem just as grotesque to them." ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied; and overhead upgrew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. Yet ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... took something wizard-like and mystical from the large spectacles through which they shone; a mouth round which played an ironical smile, and in which a physiognomist would have remarked singular shrewdness, and some closeness, complete the picture. Imagine this figure, grotesque, peregrinate, and to the eye of a peasant certainly diabolical; then perch it on the stile in the midst of those green English fields, and in sight of that primitive English village; there let it sit straddling, its long legs dangling down, a short German pipe emitting ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cocked her head to one side, extended a satin-clad foot, threw out her hands with fingers extended, and struck a grotesque pose. "Turn—and behold!" she ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque and ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... with that stare of idiotic wonder peculiar to the humbler classes of countries called civilised. We managed to withstand the ordeal of their scrutiny with an assumed air of true savage indifference. Not without an effort, however: since it was difficult to resist laughing at the grotesque exclamations and speeches, which our appearance and movements elicited from these wondering yokels. We were cautious not to notice their remarks—appearing as if we understood them not. Peg-leg, by the aid of his Anglo-American jargon—picked up ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... I found out from my men that so great was the horror of the place, that even smugglers, when hard pressed, have been known to risk capture rather than put in to the island; and on my inquiring the cause of these rumours, they gave me various vague and grotesque stories about dead men and women, and a figure which sat on the seaward cape and wept, with long hair drooping all over her; and, worst of all, of two boys, dressed in an antique dress, whom to see was certain disaster, and to ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... imposing cheminee advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic structure also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but overrun with chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild diablerie, and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork. The dim grotesque shapes of the pictures, the gesticulating, shouting crowd in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and of that strange sign dangling outside: these things took the English lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... creature, this little Maya of his. She had been born on Mars and, orphaned by some unknown disaster, had been cared for during her first years by the mysterious, grotesque native Martians. When they took her at last to one of the dome cities, she was sent to Earth for rearing. And now she was back on Mars as an undercover agent of the Earth government, seeking to ferret out the rebels known to be engaging ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you." They felt his coldness. Conversation halted when he came near and made him feel that he was the subject of their talk. As a matter of fact, he generally was. He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... came to an end at length, and Mrs. Henson rose suddenly. There was a grotesque suggestion of the marionette in the movement. She bowed as if to some imaginary personage and moved with dignity towards the door. Reginald Henson stood aside and opened it for her. She passed into the dim hall as if absolutely unconscious of his presence. Enid flashed a look of defiance at ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... undefinable thing had just gone wrong. And with that, his whole body was suddenly rigid, every muscle locking in mid-motion. He felt momentum topple him slowly forwards; then he was no longer falling but stopped, tilted off-balance at a grotesque angle, suspended in a web of forces he could not feel. Not the slightest sound had come from Kilby, invisible in ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... Of the two Gitanos one was an elderly man, tall and bony, with lean, skinny, and whimsical features, though perfectly those of a Gypsy; he spoke little, and his expressions were generally singular and grotesque. His companion, who was the man whom I had first noticed in the street, differed from him in many respects; he could be scarcely thirty, and his figure, which was about the middle height, was of Herculean proportions; shaggy black ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of affairs. There was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth. He carried a horn lantern which hung upon a swivel, and wheeling as it dangled marked grotesque shapes upon the shadier part ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... head-dress; the two latter articles, being susceptible of ornamentation, are usually adorned with eagle feathers, foxtails, or a string of sleigh-bells about the player's waist. The men are painted in the most grotesque and fantastic manner. It is not unusual to see some of them painted blue or yellow all over their persons, and before the paint has dried it is streaked with their fingers in zig-zag fashion from head to foot, sometimes up and down and sometimes zebra fashion. A yellow ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and a free-trader, if you please, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... true that virile force, preferably with a touch of the brutal, has a high place in the natural woman's heart, none the less does an ideal of male purity, of the masculine subdued to gentle virtues, make strong appeal to the imagination in her sex. To the everyday man, Kite seemed a mere pale grotesque, a creature of flabby foolishness. But Olga Hannaford was not the only girl who had dreamed of devoting her life to him. If she could believe his assurance (and she all but did believe it), for her alone had he felt anything worthy ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Why grotesque; why amazing? [Sitting in the low-backed arm-chair.] All that is amazing about it is that Philip should lack the superior courage which enables a man, in special circumstances, to sink his ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... back toward the main street, a grotesque figure with his red-brown hair tumbled over his white, nervous countenance of the pointed chin, with his hooked nose, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... with such strict attention as the foreign tongue requires, but you miss the neat, well-ordered sanctuary, the picture of family life (for there are no little children present!) and the agreeable array of dress. The flapping, monstrous bloomers tire your eyes, and so do the grotesque, coarse clothes and the tokens of extreme poverty. I grow more and more patriotic every day, and am astonished at what I see and hear ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... slightly elevated, there is placed a "Jinriki-sha," which is the riding vehicle of Japan, a two-wheeled affair resembling our modern dog-cart; it is drawn by a man in costume and seated in it is a woman, also in costume, holding above her and large enough to extend over the table, one of those grotesque paper umbrellas, which are as much a part of that country as its rice and tea. The edges of these are festooned with red and white flowers and hung with the smaller sized, globe shaped lanterns ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... produced a pipe from one pocket, after having drawn a handful of curious small jade figures from another and pushed them along the edge of the study table, without comment, for his friend to look at. Some of them were so finely carved that they looked like a heap of grotesque insects struggling together as they lay there, but though Dr. Leslie's eyes brightened as he glanced at them, he gave no other sign of interest at that time, and answered his ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... her head and winked back at the irritated saleswoman in such a grotesque fashion that the lively Lizzie giggled again, for which she was told she ought to be ashamed of herself. Good-natured Lizzie admitted the truth of this accusation, but declared that Becky was so funny she "just ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... copied from the same authentic source as that preceding it, is a somewhat grotesque portraiture of one of the Lancers of the Sultan of Begharmi, described, in an historical and geographical account by a native prince, as an extensive country, containing woods and rivers, and fields fit for cultivation; but now desolated, as the inhabitants say, by the "misconduct of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... Hugo's singular affection for the monster—he had Stephano to justify him, but unfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunken Neapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator—had made a mere grotesque of Han, but had been reduced within more artistic limits in Bug. In Le Dernier Jour and Claude Gueux it was excluded by the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not an intellectus, at any rate sibi permissus; and, as it does ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... been wrecked and his whole company massacred or drowned on or near Vanikoro. Many natives still living remembered the arrival of the French. Some of them related that they thought those who came on the big ships to be not men but spirits; and such a grotesque bit of description as was given of the peaks of cocked hats exactly expressed the way in which the appearance of the strangers would be likely to appeal to the native imagination:—"There was a projection from their foreheads or ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... time he lay awake, trembling and chattering with nervous chills, and when he did fall asleep it was only to drop into monstrous dreams in which he once again saw ever enacted, with various grotesque variations, the tragic drama which his waking eyes ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... supported the Ionic volute, while the arch, which appeared to spring from these capitals, had, for a keystone, heads more monstrous than those of the fabled animals of Ctesias; or so ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist. Here was a gibbering monkey, there a grinning pulcinello; now you viewed a chattering devil, which might have figured in the "Temptation of St. Anthony;" and now a mournful, mystic, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... if the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Caesar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovely Hesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for their great delight, like that of the ogres, is to kill all they meet, and to eat the flesh of those whom they kill. Often they appear as hunters, of monstrous size, with tusks instead of teeth, and with horns on their heads, and all kinds of grotesque and frightful weapons and ornaments. They are very strong, and make themselves stronger by various arts of magic; and they are strongest of all at nightfall, when they are supposed to roam about the jungles, to enter the tombs, and even to make their way into the ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... such—could lawfully and validly perform that function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the result of the impasse to which it would otherwise be brought by the grotesque teaching that the Deity would condemn everlastingly the soul of an unbaptised infant. This, according to Augustine, being the Christian religion, naturally some loophole had to be fabricated, because priests are not always at hand in ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields in long spokes radiate from the train and revolve. There is the grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the far side by ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson |
