"Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes, both orchestral and dramatic. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... my suspicions about that woman," she said, with thin lips. "Oh, it's monstrous, it's abominable! That boy can't ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... somewhere: to look at a horse that Crawley had to sell, and to try him in the Park; and to dine together, and to pass the evening with some jolly fellows. "That is, if you're not on duty to that pretty Miss Sedley," Crawley said, with a knowing wink. "Monstrous nice girl, 'pon my honour, though, Osborne," he was good enough to add. "Lots of tin, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... position that he assumes appears to me to be unsound. It is well enough to record a dialect, nor will any one grudge him credit for his observation and diligence, but to reduce a dialect to theoretic laws and then impose those laws upon the speakers of it is surely a monstrous step. And in this particular instance the matter is complicated by the fact that Southern English is not truly a natural dialect; Mr. Jones himself denotes it as P.S.P.Public School Pronunciation, and that we know to be very largely ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... the days of calm afterthought which followed, this attempt upon the peace of the Sanford home grew more monstrous and helped largely to mitigate the feeling against the banker. Besides, he had not run away; that was a strong point in ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... question is not whether the belief that animals so distant as a man, amonkey, an elephant, and a humming bird, asnake, afrog, and a fish, could all have sprung from the same parents is monstrous, but simply and solely whether it is true. If it is true, we shall soon learn to digest it. Appeals to the pride or humility of man, to scientific courage, or religious piety, are all ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Nevell made magnificent preparations for the royal visit; but instead of receiving the monarch as a guest, he was saluted by some of his officers, who "arrested him for treason," and imprisoned him at Calais and Guisnes. The cause of this sudden, and apparently monstrous, conduct, on the part of Edward, has not been told by Stow (Chronicles, p. 426; edit. 1615), nor by Godwyn, (Catalogue of the Bishops of England, p. 481, edit. 1601): both of whom relate the fact with singular naivete. I have a strong suspicion that ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... governess which made the child timid about confessing the loss of the pin. As she thought about the trip to Green Island with a strange little boy to whom she had never even spoken before that day, it seemed a monstrous undertaking, and for a moment she quailed before the prospect. Yet what joy if she should return with the precious pin and be able to restore it without a word of censure from any one. This thought decided her to follow when Ellis beckoned to her. Big Parker Dixon ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... selfishness, and a drinker who goes wrong is never pitied; when evil days come, the smart landlord shuns the failure, the barmaids sneer at him, and his boon companions shrink away as though the doomed man were tainted. Monstrous it is to hear the remarks made about a lost soul who is plunging with accelerated speed down the steep road to ruin. His companions compare notes about him, and all his bodily symptoms are described with truculent glee in the filthy ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... marry the younger son of a colonial family, who had been bred up as a land surveyor—Castlewood and the boys at nineteen years of age handed over to the tender mercies of a step-father of three and twenty? Oh, it was monstrous! Harry was for going straightway to his mother, protesting against the odious match, and announcing that they would leave her forever if the ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a great noise to cover this monstrous audacity, and endeavoured to renew the attack against the Duc de Bourgogne. We shall see what success attended their efforts. The army was at Soissons, near Tournai, in a profound tranquillity, the opium of which had gained the Duc de Bourgogne when ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield—that Economic Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... blood-stained rifle; in another moment he would have been safe. But he was so chilled—so stiff from the cold, that he missed his hold when first he sprang to catch the lowest branch, and before he could try again, a monstrous gray wolf dashed toward him. With a hungry howl, its jaws dripping blood, it launched itself through the air, ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... Thirdly, by copulation with an undue sex, male with male, or female with female, as the Apostle states (Rom. 1:27): and this is called the "vice of sodomy." Fourthly, by not observing the natural manner of copulation, either as to undue means, or as to other monstrous and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... amount subsequently reduced to three.[1227] This iniquity was immediately denounced and exposed through pamphlets, journals, and debates. Men frankly admitted that no reason or economic principle justified the existence of such monstrous levies. Indeed, every honest influence, legal, social, and political, opposed it. The press condemned it, good men mourned over it, and wise men unmasked it. But with the help of twenty Republicans, backed by the approval of John T. Hoffman, the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... not speaking of that kind of tallness, but another; you know what I mean, and there my friend is really monstrous." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that in this state of things there is a monstrous injustice. There is no law to compel these gentlemen to sell land, and there is no public sentiment that can affect them. They are the complete despots of the countryside. If a man does not like their domination, ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... introduced" in July, 1866, into the "House of Representatives" of the United States, at Washington, providing for relieving the Queen of her sovereign rights in the British territories between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The only excuse—an excuse far from valid for so monstrous a proposal—was that no one knew what the British Government were inclined to do; and at Washington no one believed that John Bull would "make a fight of it;" while everyone knew that if a similar Bill, with the object of enabling the Southern States to come under the dominion of the Queen, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... bullets had disordered Baxter's faculties so much as this monstrous accusation. Explanations pushed and jostled one another in his fermenting brain, but he could not utter them. On every side he met gravely reproachful eyes. George Emerson was looking at him in pained disgust. Ashe Marson's face was the face ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... contorted and distorted things dancing haphazard through my fevered brain, I determined not to go under, not to give in. My mind was a terrible tangle of combinations nevertheless—intricate, incongruous, inconsequent, monstrous; but still I plodded on. For the next four days, with my arm lying limp and lifeless at my side, and with recurring attacks of malaria, I walked on against the greatest odds, and it was not till I had reached ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... he continued, "that troop of gay dolphins, in the smooth sea beyond the island. You saw the shark, with its glaring eyes, opening its monstrous jaws, as it rose near the pretty creatures, and ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... made this summit his abode. From this summit the bridge Chinevat stretches to the vault of heaven, and to Gorodman, which is the opening in the vault above Albordj. Gorodman is the dwelling of the Fravashis and of the blessed, and the bridge leading to it is precisely above the abyss Duzahk,—the monstrous gulf, the home ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... I cried from out the horror of my soul, "you have a monstrous black sin upon your conscience! For your sake that unfortunate man fell by ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... riding level, and an orderly appeared at his elbow, Gerrard was reluctantly forced to turn and accept a written order desiring him to give up the pursuit into the hands of the officer commanding the troops. To share the honour would have been bad enough, to lose it altogether was monstrous, and his men eyed the Bombay troopers with such disfavour as made it evident that little was wanting to bring about a fratricidal fight. Gerrard was obliged to fling himself into the breach, and argue and persuade his sullen sowars into allowing themselves ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... low, distant howl saluted my ears—heard even above the tempest. It continued increasing, till it broke into a wild chorus of hideous shrieks. I had no dread of ghostly visitors. I would rather have faced a whole array of the most monstrous hobgoblins, than have felt that I was surrounded, as I knew I was, by a herd ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... outline, but the head and shoulders were seemingly enormous, and stood sharply silhouetted against the skylight in the roof immediately above. The idea flashed into my brain in a moment that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous. The huge skull, the mane-like hair, the wide-humped shoulders, suggested, in a way I did not pause to analyze, that which was scarcely human; and for some seconds, fascinated by horror, I returned ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Jupiter. Of the motion of the late Comet praedicted. The Heads of many New Observations and Experiments, in order to an Experimental History of Cold; together with some Thermometrical Discourses and Experiments. A Relation of a very odd Monstrous Calf. Of a peculiar Lead-Ore in Germany, very useful for Essays. Of an Hungarian Bolus, of the same effect with the Bolus Armenus. Of the New American Whale-fishing about the Bermudas. A Narative concerning the ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... bear arms, they are an aristocracy; not one much to my taste; but still a great fact. That, however, is not the characteristic of the English peerage. I have yet to learn they are richer than we are, better informed, wiser, or more distinguished for public or private virtue. Is it not monstrous, then, that a small number of men, several of whom take the titles of Duke and Earl from towns in this very neighbourhood, towns which they never saw, which never heard of them, which they did not form, or build, or ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... with a pleasant laugh, "what have you done to sink yourself so far in your own estimation? You and your father differed as to the propriety of our marriage; to you, as a true woman, your course was plain. This is the height and depth of your monstrous sin." ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron—heaps, heights, pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms, gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... equipment, and followed by the rest of the section, I went over to the building he had picked out. It was a monstrous barn with a platform at one end which would make an ideal stage. The section got right on the job, and before night had that place rigged out in ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... behind her veils; And jars of spice, and gilded ears of corn, And wine-red roses and rose-red wine-grails Feed her long trances while the far flutes mourn. She lies and dreams daemonic passionate things: Cherubim guard her gates with monstrous wings. ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... me, as you have told me before, that no man can be so bad as this; and my reply will be: "If you believe that such persons as the villains of tragedy and romance could exist in real life, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin? If you admire fictions much more terrible and monstrous, why is it that this character, even if regarded merely as a creature of the imagination, cannot obtain quarter at your hands? Is it not because there is more truth in it than may be altogether palatable ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been! I have fastened this monstrous chain about you—about us." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... yet deep in guilt, with the bright face of a child, but with wickedness such as might match grey hairs? Nay, the most offensive thing about him is that his pernicious deeds go scot free; he is too young to punish, yet old enough to do injury. Injury, did I say? No! crime, unfilial, black, monstrous, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... imperialism, is now again and for the last time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony, unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of decency, contrived ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hard down, and holding it down with my body, I brought the main-sheet in, hand over hand, on the run, so as to retain all possible striking force. The two starboard sweeps of the junk were crumpled up, and then the two boats came together with a crash. The Reindeer's bowsprit, like a monstrous hand, reached over and ripped out the junk's ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... whose purple pomp[119:1] Who falls not prostrate dies! And where by night, 270 Fast by each precious fountain on green herbs The lion couches: or hyaena dips Deep in the lucid stream his bloody jaws; Or serpent plants his vast moon-glittering bulk, Caught in whose monstrous twine Behemoth[119:2] yells, 275 His ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Carlyle's French Revolution was published he wrote to his brother, "I understand there have been many reviews of a very mixed character. I got one in the Times last week. The writer is one, Thackeray, a half-monstrous Cornish giant, kind of painter, Cambridge man, and Paris newspaper correspondent, who is now writing for his life in London. . . . His article is rather like him, and I suppose calculated to do ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... squares and streets so limitless in their capacity for swallowing light and colour. The sky was a bitter changeless blue; the buildings black; the snow and ice, glittering with purple and gold, swept by vast swinging shadows as though huge doors opened and shut in heaven, or monstrous birds hovered, their wings spread, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... scarcely had he said the word ere on the hill above The very shepherd Polypheme his mountain mass did move, A marvel dread, a shapeless trunk, an eyeless monstrous thing, Who down unto the shore well known his sheep was shepherding; A pine-tree in the hand of him leads on and stays his feet; The woolly sheep his fellows are, his only pleasure sweet, 660 The only solace of his ill. But when he touched the waters deep, and mid the waves was come, He falls to ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... not vpon any action perfourmed neere home, nor in any part of Europe commonly frequented by our shipping, as for example: Not vpon that victorious exploit not long since atchieued in our narow Seas agaynst that monstrous Spanish army vnder the valiant and prouident conduct of the right honourable the lord Charles Howard high Admirall of England: Not vpon the good seruices of our two woorthie Generals in their late Portugall ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... mind beyond an overwhelming desire to put a bad fright into his roommate in payment for what he considered a monstrous act of duplicity. It would serve Travail right if, once he entered the secondary plane of the shell, he would be forced to stay there a while. A good scare would cause ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... hollow drumming intermingled with the cadence of a chorus of hoarse voices. A thrill went through Say, she stopped again and listened. Was not her husband's voice among them? Certainly he was there, doing his duty with the rest. And if he was as guilty toward her as the others? That monstrous thought rose again, it pushed her onward. She crawled ahead slowly, scarcely conscious of the danger attending her mission. Large blocks of debris, tent-shaped erosive hillocks, impeded her progress; they crowded along the foot of the cliffs like ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... souls, with upturned faces and eyes, unseen of Annie, all their regards converging upon the countenance of the minister. He was a thin-faced cadaverous man, with a self-severe saintly look, one to whom religion was clearly a reality, though not so clearly a gladness, one whose opinions-vague half-monstrous embodiments of truth—helped to give him a consciousness of the life which sprung from a source far deeper than his consciousness could reach. I wonder if one will ever be able to understand the worship of his childhood—that revering upward look which must have been founded on a reality, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... sermon he had preached against the Mass on the previous Sunday in St. Giles's Church, thought that a personal interview would mitigate his sternness. The Queen took him to task for his book entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women, and his intolerance towards every one who differed from him in opinion, and further requested him to obey the precepts of the Scriptures, a copy of which she perceived in his possession, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... a woman holds The power to draw his fangs! And yet some harm must come, some blood must flow, In spite of all my poor endeavour. O War, how much I hate thy wizard arts, That, with the clash and din of brass and steel, O'erpowers the voice of pleading reason; And with thy lurid light, in monstrous rays Enfolds the symmetry of human love, Making a brother seem a phantom or a ghoul! Before thy deadly scowl kind peace retires, And seeks the upper skies. O, cruel are the hearts that cry "War!" "War!" As if War were an angel, not a fiend; His gilded chariot, a triumphal car, ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... Captain Deverax! We shall be better without 'em!" And that deadliest of all feuds sprang up —a rivalry between the guests of rival hotels. The Metropole had issued a general invitation to a dance, and after the monstrous conduct of the Clutterbucks the question arose whether the Beau-Site should not boycott the dance. However, it was settled that the truly effective course would be to go with critical noses in the air, and emit unfavourable comparisons with the Beau-Site. The Beau-Site suddenly became ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... "We have lost God" would have been a fitting lamentation. But to celebrate His festival indifferently under such conditions is to be unconscious of having lost Him. How long ago did the soul die, and when did the building up on death begin? What a terrible episode of madness is this monstrous slaughter, upon which the tree of peace was planted in honor ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... them hang you will understand the things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will be touched, your monstrous pride abated." ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... times crossed the Atlantic on business affairs, for he had been an importer in Broad-street. And of winter evenings in New York, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich-street, he used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of the masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about going up into the ball of St. Paul's in London. Indeed, during my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... tactful, I know, but you exaggerate, Katharine. People are talking about us. She was right to tell us. It only confirms my own feeling—the position is monstrous." ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... whitened the east; and up out of the ghastly fog edging the German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against the daybreak, soared a Laemmergeyer, beating the livid void ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... railroads. He smelled an unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain- elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria, dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek, looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . . . Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... meal, washing it down with some water from the lake, which was here perfectly fresh. While I was dipping my cup in the water, a long dark snout darted towards it; and I had barely time to withdraw my hand, letting the cup slip, when a pair of hideous jaws closed on it. They were those of a monstrous alligator. A blow from a paddle and the shouts of the men made the brute disappear; but I took good care not again to put my hand overboard while the boat was motionless. Several others rose a ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... lifts a monstrous roar, Which sends a shudder through the waves, Shakes to its base the Italian shore, And echoing runs through AEtna's caves. From rocks and woods the Cyclop host Rush startled forth, and crowd the coast. There glaring fierce we see them stand In idle rage, a hideous band, The sons ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... maximum speed. The whole laboratory quivered from its vibration. The dynamo hummed and whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noises within more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over the power-leads to the monstrous, misshapen coils. Professor Denham bent over one of them, straightened, and nodded. Tommy Reames nodded to Evelyn, and she ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the thought! for deeply do I rue My brother Atlas' doom. Far off he stands In sunset land, and on his shoulder bears The pillar'd mountain-mass whose base is earth, Whose top is heaven, and its ponderous load Too great for any grasp. With pity too I saw Earth's child, the monstrous thing of war, That in Cilicia's hollow places dwelt— Typho; I saw his hundred-headed form Crushed and constrained; yet once his stride was fierce, His jaws gaped horror and their hiss was death, And all heaven's host he challenged ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... way or the other in the Sabbath, since that promise, it would be impossible to understand any other promise in the Bible; how much more reasonable to believe God than man. If men will allow themselves to believe the monstrous absurdity that FOREVER, as in this promise, ended at the resurrection, then they can easily believe that the Sabbath was changed from the seventh to the first day of the week. Or if they choose the other extreme, abolished until the people of God should awake to be clothed ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... him, ye gods, from monstrous madness, save him, restore his darkened mind to sanity. And thou, O sleep, subduer of ill, the spirit's repose, thou better part of human life, swift-winged child of Astraca, drowsy brother of cruel ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... up. Some monstrous suggestion of Form was almost upon him. He grasped the projection and just as his head sank out of sight the Form seemed ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... spread. It has become woven into the warp of history; it has grown to be one of those "facts" which are unquestioningly accepted, but it stands upon no better foundation than the frequent repetition which a charge so monstrous could not escape. Its source is not a contemporary one. It is first mentioned by Guicciardini; and there is no logical conclusion to be formed other than that Guicciardini invented it. Another story which owes its existence mainly, and its particulars almost ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... me, Lucius, Our civil discords have produced such crimes, Such monstrous crimes, I am surprized at nothing. —Oh Lucius, I am sick of this bad world! The daylight and the sun grow painful ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... Monstrous things are done in Paris. The future of a province depends on the mere signature of men who (through intrigues I have no time to explain to you) often stop the execution of useful and much-needed work; in fact, the best plans are often those which offer most to the cupidity of commercial ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... nose, send somebody to show her a sore leg, a scalded head, or a rupture. If you are happy enough to fall in with a tender husband leading his big wife to church, send companions that have but one arm, or two thumbs, or tell her of some monstrous child you have brought forth, and the good man will pay you to be gone, if he gives slightly, it is but following, getting before the lady, and talking louder, and you may depend upon his searching his pocket to better purpose ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... serpent kind it something looked, But monstrous, with a thousand snaky heads."—Pollok, B. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... dropping off him. But he wore one wondrous garment—a gigantic cloak that fell from collar-bone to heel—of pale pink silk, wrought all over in cunningest needlework of hands long since dead, with the loves of the Hindu gods. The monstrous figures leaped in and out of the light of the fire as he settled the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... had expected to see stalls and milking machines and hay he saw an expanse of metal floor and monstrous machinery. The barn door which had been a rickety wooden slab from the outside was a gleaming sheet of metal from the inside. It glided silently shut and left no joint or seam to show where there had ...
— Double Take • Richard Wilson
... words in her tiny heart, and felt sure that she could never find courage to say them aloud to that great and important man. The announcement would be too monstrous, incredible, and absurd. People would laugh. He would laugh. And Nina could stand anything better than being laughed at. Even supposing she proved to him his paternity—she thought of the horridness of going to lawyers' offices—he might ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... gold-tesserate floors of Jove; Linking such heights and such humilities Hand in hand in ordinal dances, That I do think my tread, Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass, Flickers the unwithering stars. This to the shunless fardel of the world Nerves my uncurb-ed back; that I endure, The monstrous Temple's moveless caryatid, With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things, ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... say that even grief, which we have already said ought to be avoided as a monstrous and fierce beast, was appointed by nature, not without some good purpose, in order that men should lament when they had committed a fault, well knowing they had exposed themselves to correction, rebuke, and ignominy; ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... sicknesses of all those sorts: venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones. And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! how much do we lack of having remedies for every disease, when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a Hercules against ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... hush till he should have done what he had come to do. His bare feet on the sidewalk slapped and shuffled, and he hurried along close to the walls; the noise he made, for all his caution, appeared to him monstrous, enough to wake the sleepers in the houses and draw them to their windows to see the man who was going ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... poor creature from the gutter can put an end to himself; there is no nobility in the act and no great amount of courage required for it. It is a deed rather of cowardice shirking duty, generated in a monstrous feeling of self, and accomplished in the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... every stick of her fine old-fashioned furniture. Polishing of stairs and floors was a joy to her. We tramped in and out in muddy boots. We scattered tobacco ashes. We opened bedroom windows, even on wet nights, and rain came in. We used monstrous and unheard-of quantities of water. Yet no sooner had one guest departed than Madame grew ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... slitten ears, clipped[FN69] beard and moustaches, red, protruding eyes, bleached, hollow, flabby cheeks, nose like an egg-plant and face like a cobbler's apron, teeth overlapping one another,[FN70] lips like camel's kidneys, loose and pendulous; brief, a monstrous favour; for he was the frightfullest of the folk of his time; his grinders had been knocked[FN71] out and his teeth were like the tusks of the Jinn that fright the fowls in the hen-house. Now the princess was the fairest and most graceful woman of her time, more elegant ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... was legally married, he should assume the responsibilities of married life; and if he had honest reason for not recognizing the marriage, he should stop the woman from pursuing him. If the case kept Carnac out of public life and himself in, then justice would be done; for it was monstrous that a veteran should be driven into obscurity by a boy. In making his announcement he would be fighting his son as though he was a stranger and not of his own blood and bones. He had no personal connection with Carnac in the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... being refuses the earthly nourishment offered him, how strangely and horribly moves the unsteady voice up and down in that singular scale! He demands speedy repentance; the spirit's time is short, the way it must travel, long. And Don Juan, in monstrous obstinacy withstanding the eternal commands, beneath the growing influence of the dark spirits, struggles and writhes and finally perishes, keeping to the last, nevertheless, that wonderful expression of majesty in every ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... she said; "monstrous depravity—poor old Gustard's!" And still laughing that dangerous laugh, she turned on her heel ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pleasing interest, they may both surprise and entertain; which cannot be effected where no regard is paid to probability. I have never yet found a regular, well-connected fable in any of our books of chivalry—they are all inconsistent and monstrous; the style is generally bad; and they abound with incredible exploits, lascivious amours, absurd sentiment, and miraculous adventures; in short, they should ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... means of taking it away, and the devil has somewhat aided him. The moccoletto is kindled by approaching it to a light. But who can describe the thousand means of extinguishing the moccoletto?—the gigantic bellows, the monstrous extinguishers, the superhuman fans. Every one hastened to purchase moccoletti—Franz and Albert among ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... you roused me," he said, "though generally I hate to have my sleep broken. But just now I was having a nightmare. I was dreaming that a monstrous Katydid was chasing me. And if you hadn't called to me I don't know what would have happened.... I think," he added, "I must have dined ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... the twenty-eighth Spectator, April 2, 1711, took note of the severance which had taken place between sign and trade, and of the absurdity that the sign no longer had any significance. After satirizing first, the monstrous conjunctions in signs of "Dog and Gridiron," "Cat and Fiddle" and so forth; and next the absurd custom by which young tradesmen, at their first starting in business, added their own signs to those of the masters under whom they had served their apprenticeship; the essayist ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... English and Belgian standard; but some parts of India are cursed with more than double this number; indeed one district has nearly eight hundred to the square mile. This seems to be the limit even for India, as population does not increase beyond it, and female infanticide begins to protrude its monstrous form whenever population becomes so dense. In the Punjaub, for instance, the males exceed the females sixteen per cent.—a fearful revelation; but it is just the same in many parts of China. All authorities agree ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... from which even the government mails were generally excluded; and, after saluting both ladies, and politely desiring the elder to remain present, in order to be sure that his conversation was strictly moral, the monstrous old gentleman pulled a memorandum book from his pocket ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... writing in 1857, said that Young "by the native force and vigor of a strong mind" had taken from beneath the Mormon church system "the monstrous stilts of a miserable superstition, and consolidated it into a compact scheme of the sternest fanaticism."* In other words, he might have explained, instead of relying on such "revelations" as served ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... a particularly large nose, the fool said out loud: 'What a terrible nose that gentleman has got!' So all the family pretended not to hear, and were rather uncomfortable, and when the fool saw that, he said: 'How I lied when I said that gentleman's nose was monstrous; now I come to look at it I really think it's rather a small nose!' Well, of course, no one could help laughing after that, and they all went off into peals of merriment, ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the kench, and Charlie let out, clapping his hands, and praying too, and kissing Jeannie, and other fantastic tricks of fancy in her own domain, unburdened with heavy clay which soils and presses upon her wings and binds her to earth, and to these monstrous likenesses of things, which she says are all a lying nature under the bonds of a blind fate, from where she cannot get free, even though she screams of murder and oppression and cruelty, and all the ills that earth-born flesh inherits from ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden us from sleep. Through a fearsome gorge a stream wound and in it I hunted one certain giant trout. Savagely it took the fly, but always the line broke when I struck; rather, it dissolved; there would ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the cabin she seized her husband's gun, and loading it with buckshot, hurried out and killed the monstrous brute. Skilled in woodcraft, like most pioneer women, she skinned the animal and cutting it up bore the pieces to the cabin. Her first thought then was of her children, and after she had given them a hearty meal of the tender moose-flesh she partook of it herself, and then, refreshed and strengthened, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of Philip's domain, without the possession of which his conquest of England and his incorporation of France were but childish visions, even if they were not monstrous chimeras at best—were to be in a manner left to themselves, while their consummate governor and general was to go forth and conquer France at the head of a force with which he had been in vain attempting ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... liest, most ignorant monster: I am in case to justle a constable.[424-5] Why, thou debosh'd[424-6] fish, thou, was there ever man a coward that hath drunk so much sack as I to-day? Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half a fish and half ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... amid the foot-hills on the trail which led up to the Kicking Horse Pass. The sun had already passed from sight, beyond the white summits above us, and the shadow of the monstrous mountain range darkened the prairie to the east, to the horizon's rim. Our bivouac was made in a grove of lofty firs, six or eight in number; and a little rivulet, trickling from the upper slopes, fell, with soft, lapsing sound, within a few feet of our camp-fire. We did not even pitch a tent, ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... pushed on boldly to Rouen. Now throughout the length and breadth of his vast domains he was kidnapping children, mingling magic with debauchery, and offering to demons the blood and the limbs of his countless victims. His monstrous doings spread terror round his castles of Tiffauges and Machecoul, and already the hand of the Church was ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... not like this idea at all, and became more than ever intent on his own matrimonial prospects. He almost thought that he had a right to Lady Ongar's money, and he certainly did think that a monstrous injustice was done to him by this idea of a marriage between her and his cousin. "I mean to ask her as I've gone so ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... the fruit. This is why sex-denial and sex-excesses so often go together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediaeval cloisters. Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Flyer swooping down With wings to span the globe, And splendor for his robe And splendor for his crown. He lighted on the helm with a foot of fire, And spun the Monster overboard: And that monstrous thing abhorred, Gnashing with balked desire, Wriggled like a worm infirm Up the Worm Of the loathly figurehead. There he crouched and gnashed; And his head re-horned, and gashed From the other's ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... twenty-odd engineers who scarcely see their bunks from the Elbe to the Hudson. And, in that cool, grey, pearly dawn, think of those passengers sleeping in their palatial state-rooms, with never a thought of the slaves who drive that monstrous ship across the Atlantic at such an appalling speed. I say "appalling" because I know. The smoking-room nuisance will say, "Pooh! My dear fellow, the Lusitania licks us clean with her twenty-five knots." He is coldly critical because he ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... stay for ever,' said Jasper, 'except of course in the holidays. She has taken Ardshiel, and she is going to turn it into a great school, a great, monstrous, magnificent school; and we are all going—we, and you, and heaps more children besides; and mother is nearly off her head with delight. Of course, as far as I am concerned, I shall only be able to stay at such a school for one year, for I must ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... historian above quoted, moreover, says that "two monstrous and calamitous errors were adopted in this fourth century: 1. That it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie when, by that means, the interests of the Church might be promoted. 2. That errors in religion, when maintained and adhered to after proper admonition, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and, wheresoe'er, Coursing what sea, or cabled in what port, The greatness of thine eye may light on him, Crush him with thunder! Thou, too, great Neptune of the lower deeps, Heave thy wet head up from the monstrous sea; Advance thy trident high as to the clouds, And with a not to be repeated blow, Dash the sin-freighted ship of that rash man! And thou, old iron-sceptred Eolus, Shatter the bars of thine enclosed winds; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... down in the way of business. They brought her in from the remote cove, with loud lamentations and much pride. She must have rocked back and forth between the shore and the reef, for when they found her, her body was badly battered. From the cliff above, they said, she looked at first like a monstrous catch of seaweed on the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... blazes with jewels. Six smaller cases, reputed to be of gold, are enclosed within the large one, and under the last is the tooth of Buddha. As it is as large as that of a great bull, one trembles to think how monstrous must have been the jaw ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... to see her prosperous; but she must needs disturb every quarter of the Globe and try to make mischief and set every one by the ears; and, of course, it will end some day in a regular crusade against the universal disturber of the world! It is really monstrous! ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... she began to cry, sitting there by the stone balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising. And now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because she was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the story of Ganymede. And so befel it, O king, that men imitated all these things, and became adulterers, and defilers of themselves with mankind, and doers of other monstrous deeds, in imitation of their god. How then can an adulterer, one that defileth himself by unnatural lust, a slayer of his ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... everything but honor. At first we called them Rebels, and no penalties were deemed too severe for them to suffer; but later we called them Confederates, waging war for a cause which they honestly deemed sacred, and for which they cheerfully offered up their lives,—a monstrous delusion, indeed, but one for which we ceased to curse them, and soon learned to forgive, after their cause was lost. Resentment gave place to pity, and they became like erring brothers, whom it was our duty to forgive, and in many respects ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... infidelity—was quite a familiar one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... noble character and aim, was put to death as a criminal. Was that the end of it all? Impossible—monstrous—never, if this world be indeed a cosmos. The one firm certainty which Socrates seems to have held, "No evil can happen to a good man in life or death,"—flashes in Plato's mind into a glorious hope of immortality, embodied ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... my readers should be tempted to conclude from what I have said that the Catholic Church is opposed to the reading of the Scriptures, or that she is the enemy of the Bible. The Catholic Church the enemy of the Bible! Good God! What monstrous ingratitude! What base calumny is contained in that assertion! As well might you accuse the Virgin Mother of trying to crush the Infant Savior at her breast as to accuse the Church, our Mother, of attempting to crush out of existence the Word of God. As well might ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... inexhaustible variety of arguments. These ideas are based upon his antagonism to religion and to government. It was always Dieu et l'Etat that he was fighting, and not until both the ideas and the institutions which had grown up in support of "these monstrous oppressions" had been destroyed and swept from the earth could there arise, thought Bakounin, a free society, peopled with happy and emancipated human souls. When one has once obtained this conception of Bakounin's fundamental views, there is ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... secret at once; for I have a monstrous secret to confide before I can ask your counsel. The case is, then, that I am married: yes, I have privately married a dear young belle; and if you knew her, and I hope you will, you would say everything in her praise. But she is ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... thought she saw the houses on the tops of houses which he had described to her, in efforts to assist her to imagine structures more elaborate than the little, single storied cabins which were all that she had ever seen. Strange conceptions of the railroad, with its monstrous engines puffing smoke and fire would have been terrifying had there not been, ever at her side as dreams revealed them, a stalwart youth in corduroys to bear her from their path through rings ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... uproarious applause as the eloquent protests of the friar and the insolent responses of the Pope awakened their interest; for Italy then, like the unhappy martyr, had risen to proclaim the decline of that monstrous power which, in the name of a religion profaned by it, sanctifies its own illegitimate and feudal origin, its abuses, its pride, its vices, its crimes. It was a beautiful and affecting spectacle to see the illustrious poet receiving the warm congratulations of his fellow-citizens, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... change from his dollar-bill leaped in his hand. Some of it sprang overboard and tinkled across the floor, with the brigand in pursuit. A monstrous suspicion had begun, to ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... to pierce the sky, And hide their basements from the curious eye. Mountains—with waves of ashes covered o'er! In graduated blocks of six feet square From golden base to top, from earth to air Their ever heightening monstrous steps ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... literature as a career involves very real dangers. I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the right-hand trouser pocket. For, let it be honestly stated, the business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous egotism. Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and idiocies—these are the only monopoly the writer has. This is his only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the good of any House of Lords at all. "Then you must be a low Radical!" said Edward, with fine contempt. The inference seemed hardly necessary, but what could I do? I accepted the situation, and said firmly, Yes, I was a low Radical. In this monstrous character I had been obliged to masquerade ever since; but now I could throw it off, and look the ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... that, a certain Jewish usurer at Damascus had told him that, when I met his wife at the wedding of the Wali's daughter, I tore her diamonds off her head, flung them on the ground, and stamped on them, saying that they were made out of the blood of the poor. I was amused at this monstrous fabrication, but I was also annoyed. In England there may be much smoke but little fire, but in the East the smoke always tells that the fire is fierce, and one must check a lie before it has time to travel far. Knowing what certain Jews in England ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... deliver me from this Prodigy. They having urg'd him, desiring to know what was the Matter, he fixing his Eyes up to Heaven, and pointing with his Finger to a certain Quarter of it, don't you see, says he, that monstrous Dragon arm'd with fiery Horns, and its Tail turn'd up in a Circle? And they denying they saw it, he bid them look earnestly, every now and then pointing to the Place: At last one of them, that he might not seem to be bad-sighted, affirmed that ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... singers' lips untold Of pale Beatrice, though her death-note rang From other strings divine Ere his rekindling line With yet more piteous and intolerant pang Pierced all men's hearts anew That heard her passion through Till fierce from throes of fiery pity sprang Wrath, armed for chase of monstrous beasts, Strong to lay waste the kingdom of the seed ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cried—he was going too fast for me—"stay!" His monstrous conception, though it marched some way with my own suspicions, outran them far! I saw no sufficient grounds for it. "The King—the king would not permit such a thing, M. ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which was puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth vegetable life in lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations. Nowhere in the North is the soil so prolific. ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... even caught myself wondering whether, had I any preferential opportunities of getting through first, as some Red Cross and otherwise influential people had, I should make use of them. To take any advantage of this weary waiting line of suspects, of which I was one, would have been almost monstrous. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... loyalty, and industry, and reasonable worship that have made her sons the admiration of past and present time; and before me, to the north, Lough Derg, with its far-famed isle, reposing there as the monstrous birth of a dreary and degraded superstition, the enemy of mental cultivation, and destined to keep the human understanding in the same dark unproductive state as the moorland waste that lay outstretched around. I was soon joined by my guide and by two men carrying ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that you could discover no symptom of a mouth, except when he opened it to speak, or to put in a morsel of food. Then, indeed, you suddenly became aware of a cave hidden behind the impervious and darksome shrubbery. There ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... had returned. The sea, changing from the warm glitter of a gem, and attuned to the grays and blacks of space, resembled a monstrous cinder under a ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... caste things as a heart and natural affections? But somehow he did have a heart, and it was in the right place, and natural affections for his own flesh and blood, like men with a white skin. 'Twas monstrous in him to be sure, but he could not help it. The slave iron had entered his soul, and the wound which it ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... "Of incongruities a monstrous pile, Calling men brothers, crushing them the while; With air humane, a misanthropic brute; Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-'cute; Weak 'midst his choler, modest in his pride; Yearning for virtue, lust personified; Statesman ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... of France. Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the united princes of Germany seemed a solid and serried phalanx of Protestantism, to break through which should be hopeless. Yet at that moment, so pregnant with a monstrous future, there was hardly a sound Protestant policy anywhere but in Holland. How long would that policy remain sound and united? How long would the Republic speak through the imperial voice of Barneveld? ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of visions that lies just outside the realm of sleep—in which great things become small, and small things acquire a fantastic and monstrous importance—she worried and fretted because Lionel had laughingly complained on the previous evening that henceforth there would be no more home-made lemonade for him. Well, now, if she—that is to say, if Nina—were in her humble way to try what she could do in that direction? ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... father a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have had four children of this bigness, and four of ordinary growth, whereof two of each are dead. If, as my Lord Ormond certifies, it be true that they are no older, it is very monstrous. So home and to dinner with my wife and to pipe, and then I to the office, where busy all the afternoon till the evening, and then with my wife by coach abroad to Bow and Stratford, it being so dusty weather ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... about my movements. If you are unable or unwilling to order the removal of the body, I'll telegraph to the chief of police at Knolesworth, and ask him to act. Further, I shall request Dr. Foxton to examine the poor lady's injuries. It strikes me as a monstrous proceeding that you should attempt to record my evidence at this moment, and I refuse to become a party ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... children are finding in their nurses, rather than in their mothers, their religious teachers? The influence of Romish servants in our homes is felt in still another way. Because of them there is a barrier to discussion, or even to conversation, concerning this monstrous error, which, like the frogs of Egypt, invades our very bread-troughs. No man dare express his mind concerning Romanism at his table if the servant is a Romanist, lest he lose the services so much in demand, or lest he be reported to the priest, and so be placed under the ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... A monstrous dome of smoke hung over the town. Now and then a gust of sea wind tore it apart, and through the rifts we saw the silver cup of the moon and the host of stars. We lay long on the hillock. I suppose the hour and the mighty fates involved made us serious and silent. Far away seventy cannon thundered ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... not dream of such a thing, uncle. Do you think that I have come down here with the idea of turning you and my aunt and cousin out, and taking your place? If I had known it, I should not have come down at all. It would be monstrous if, after you have been master here for twenty-five years, I should come down to claim the ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... one else should even for a moment attach credence to the monstrous suggestion that capitalists fomented America's entrance into the war because they feared that otherwise the amounts loaned by them to the Allies might be jeopardized or lost, is a truly distressing manifestation ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... fools! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! But you are so eaten up by pride and vanity, that you will end by devouring each other—that is my prophecy! Is not this absurd? Is it not monstrous chaos? And after all this, that shameless creature will go and beg their pardon! Are there many people like you? What are you smiling at? Because I am not ashamed to disgrace myself before you?—Yes, I am disgraced—it can't be helped now! But don't ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... but brave in ribbons, which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Now they were in it and Alan became aware that they had entered the treasure house of the Asiki, since here were piled up great heaps of gold, gold in ingots, gold in nuggets, in stone jars filled with dust, in vessels plain or embossed with monstrous shapes in fetishes and in little squares and discs that looked as though they had served as coins. Never had he seen so much ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the pieces represented here. In this particular there is a strange obliquity of reason, arising out of habitual exaggeration of feeling, that really seems to disqualify most of the women, even from perceiving what is monstrous, provided it be sentimental and touching. I was particularly advised to go to the Theatre Madame to see a certain piece by a coterie of very amiable women, whom I met the following night at a house where we all regularly resorted, once a week. On ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... get at him. Then, when the little Tsar dismounted from his horse, he and his dogs came into the hut, and the dogs began snuffing at the needle in the wall and barked at it, but the brother knew not the cause thereof. But his sister burst into tears and said, "Why dost thou keep such monstrous dogs? Such a kennel of them makes me ill with anguish!" Then he shouted to the dogs, and they sat down quite still. Then she said to him, "I am so ill, brother, that nothing will make me well but hare's milk. Go and get it for me."—"I'll ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... and worst of all, the too-indulgent friendship shown to a Parisian fopling, had formed the subject of conversation in many an assembly of pious ladies, and hands and eyebrows had been uplifted at the iniquities of Chilton Abbey, as second only to the monstrous goings-on ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... historical reality of Scripture. I will not waste time with inquiring whether this method is old or new. It is certainly much in fashion; and it is certainly finding advocates in high quarters. I therefore make no apology for introducing the monstrous thing to your notice. It requires, I should hope, only to be understood, to ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... and was carrying a light shot gun, having given my heavy double-barreled rifle to the boy to carry. The plantation extended over two hills, with a deep hollow between, planted with sugar cane. Before I had crossed the hollow I saw on the opposite slope a monstrous gorilla, standing erect and looking directly towards me. Without turning my face I beckoned to the boy to bring me my rifle, but no rifle came,—the little coward had bolted, and I lost my chance. The huge beast stared at me for about two minutes, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... raffish, handsome, slender, red-haired fellow, somewhat suggestive of the royal duke, yet rather more like a sneak-thief, and with a whiff somewhere of the dancing-master. At first glance you recognized in the actor a personage, for he compelled the eye with a monstrous vividness of color and gesture. To-night he had missed his lady at their rendezvous, owing to my premature appearance, and had ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... they become inoffensive. This is, however, repugnant to the tidy minds of European sanitary experts, who give orders for the burial of the deceased. The wiser Egyptian is overruled and has to do the burying. Now it takes a simply monstrous hole to hold a camel, and the result of the clash of English and Egyptian ideas is a very imperfectly buried carcase, just covered from the beneficent influence of the sun, but filling the surrounding air with ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... will be associated in my mind with the ceaseless ring and din of riveting-hammers, where, day by day, hour by hour, a new fleet is growing, destroyers and torpedo boats alongside monstrous submarines—yonder looms the grim bulk of Super-dreadnought or battle cruiser or the slender shape ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol |
