"Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terror of the demon. The presence of purity is a sharp pain to impurity, and an evil spirit is stirred to its depths when in contact with Jesus. Monstrous growths that love the dark shrivel and die in sunshine. The same presence which is joy to some may be a very hell to others. We may approach even here that state of feeling which broke out in these shrieks of malignity, hatred, and dread. It is an awful thing when the only relief is to get away ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fair and gracious lady was caught in a trap. They saw how she longed to speak yet did not speak, and they knew thereby there was some reason for her keeping silence. Messer Folco looked long at Messer Simone dei Bardi as he stood there clearly visible in the mingled lights—large, almost monstrous, truculent, ugly, the embodiment of savage strength and barbaric appetites. Then Folco looked from Simone's bulk to his daughter, who stood there as cold and white and quiet as if she had been a stone image and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... many years ago, I saw him chaffing on the sidewalk in London, in front of the Athenaeum Club, with a monstrous-sized, "copiously ebriose" cabman, and I judged from the driver's ludicrously careful way of landing the coin deep down in his breeches-pocket, that Thackeray had given him a very unusual fare. "Who is your fat friend?" I asked, crossing over to shake hands with him. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... that thought and imagination had never been so swift. If death found him presently, how would it come? Would he get decent burial or be left for the peccaries and the coyotes? Would his people ever know where he had fallen? How wretched, how miserable his state! It was cowardly, it was monstrous for him to cling longer to this doomed life. Then the hate in his heart, the hellish hate of these men on his trail—that was like a scourge. He felt no longer human. He had degenerated into an animal that could think. His heart ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic genius ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... sent my blood to the boil. There was a private in our shed called Clausel, a man of a very ugly disposition. He had made one of the followers of Goguelat; but, whereas Goguelat had always a kind of monstrous gaiety about him, Clausel was no less morose than he was evil-minded. He was sometimes called the General, and sometimes by a name too ill-mannered for repetition. As we all sat listening, this man's hand was laid on my shoulder, and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... organisms being created on the American type in America, it might, I think, be said that they were so created to prevent them being too well created, so as to beat the aborigines; but this seems to me, somehow, a monstrous doctrine. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... I'm monstrous clever," she whispered to herself. "I am going to have my own way. I'll love poor Aunt Sophy. Yes, I will. I'll kiss her, and I'll make up to her, and I'll keep her room full of ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... profoundly silent, the whole house was still: nothing about him gave a hint of what was going on, darkly and dumbly, in the room he had flown from, and with the covering of his eyes oblivion and reassurance seemed to fall on him. But they fell for a moment only; then his lids opened again to the monstrous vision. There it was, stamped on his pupils, a part of him forever, an indelible horror burnt into his body and brain. But why into his—just his? Why had he alone been chosen to see what he had seen? What business was it of ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... And it was,—a 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 ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... between its jaws, glutted, as it were, with the very entrails of the earth, and growling over its endless meal, like some savage animal, some legendary dragon, some fabulous beast, symbol of inordinate and monstrous gluttony. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... accustomed to seat himself on the cliff, in the place that is to-day still called St. Mael's chair. At his feet the rocks bristling with green seaweed and tawny wrack seemed like black dragons as they faced the foam of the waves with their monstrous breasts. He watched the sun descending into the ocean like a red Host whose glorious blood gave a purple tone to the clouds and to the summits of the waves. And the holy man saw in this the image of the mystery ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... was a big two-story frame affair, built of California lumber, with a galvanized iron roof. So disproportionate was it to the slender ring of the atoll that it showed out upon the sand-strip and above it like some monstrous excrescence. They of the Malahini paid the courtesy visit ashore immediately after anchoring. Other captains and buyers were in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day. Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... it: a father who tries to kill his daughter! A father who, for months on end, repeats his monstrous attempt four, five, six times over again!... Well, isn't that enough to blight a less sensitive soul than Jeanne's for good and ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... excuse for a declaration so monstrous. Perhaps I am the only person who can satisfy you in regard to a certain fact about which you have expressed some curiosity. Inspector, have you ever solved the mystery of the two broken coffee-cups found amongst ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... the young man's turn, who, seeing that we were not best pleased with his mate's efforts, by every sort of sign assured us that water existed in another range to the East. So turning in that direction over monstrous high ridges, crossing them obliquely, in five miles we cut a small watercourse, and following it up to its head found ourselves on the top of a range of barren sandstone hills, over which were dotted white-stemmed stunted gums—a most desolate place. The travelling was very ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the next century comes Schenck of Grafenberg, staggering under his monstrous volume of "Casus Rariores,"—ready to fall fainting by the wayside, when lo! the shining ones meet him too, and lift him and lighten him with the utterance of these fifty-one distinct poems which we see hung up on so many votive tablets ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... that Lieutenant is!" thought Aunt Maria. "Make those poor fellows carry those monstrous packs? Nonsense and tyranny! How different from Mr. Coronado! He ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... believe; but if he were ever so much there, I do not think Mr. Palmer would visit him, for he is in the opposition, you know, and besides it is such a way off. I know why you inquire about him, very well; your sister is to marry him. I am monstrous glad of it, for then I shall have her for a ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... make but a faint appeal to Western minds. Nevertheless, in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the scintillant sky,—to make me forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanogawa itself,—the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... boy give up his faith with its tremor and private laughter. Because a child has a place for everything, this boy had placed the monstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be kept out of sight by the bed curtain. If that corner were left uncovered, the fear would grow stronger than the fun; "the man would see me," said the little boy. But let the curtain be ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... and the piled heaps were already melting, but it was bitterly cold. Bart wrapped himself in the silvery cloak, glad of its warmth, and struggled back across the slushy, ice-strewn meadow that had been so pink and flowery in the sunshine. The Swiftwing, a monstrous dark egg looming in the twilight, seemed like home. Bart felt the heavenly warmth close around him with a sigh of pure relief, but the Second Officer, coming up the hatchway, ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... that somewhere, a long way off, there dwelt three dreadful sisters, monstrous ogrish women, with golden wings and claws of brass, and with serpents growing on their heads instead of hair. Now these women were so awful to look on that whoever saw them was turned at once into stone. And two of them could not be put to death, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... to be playing Upon his pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) "Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats; I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampire-bats: And as for what your brain bewilders, If I can rid your town of rats Will you give me a thousand guilders?" "One? Fifty thousand!" was the exclamation Of the astonished ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... wronged—terribly wronged—by himself, by Jasmine; but he had loved Jasmine since she was a child, before Rudyard came—in truth, he all but possessed her when Rudyard came; and there was some explanation, if no excuse, for that betrayal; but this other, it was incredible, it was monstrous. It was incredible but yet it was true. Thoughts that overturned all his past, that made a melee of his life, rushed and whirled through his mind as he read the letter with assumed deliberation when he saw what it was. He read slowly that he might ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... when you find that you have guessed correctly the very first time, as the boys would say? That would be the magnificent compensation to me. You will need but one glance at this wonderful specimen. One glance will be sufficient. You will instantly exclaim: 'What a monstrous fine boy—or girl!' as the case may be. ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... paths, which, in England, all are invited to pursue. The jealousy of despotic governments is ever on the watch to stifle and put down the genius that would busy itself on the serious affairs of men. Instances might be mentioned in which this monstrous system has been carried into effect. The smothered energies of these restless spirits must somewhere find a vent, and Arteaga has eloquently described one of the effects thus produced upon the Italians. "The love of pleasure," he remarks, "the only recompense for the loss of their ancient ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the sisters were to their lodger's bulk, they were not prepared for the marvellous increase caused by the monstrous hairy garment. ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... and will continue to say: The budget process has broken down; it needs a drastic overhaul. With each ensuing year, the spectacle before the American people is the same as it was this Christmas: budget deadlines delayed or missed completely, monstrous continuing resolutions that pack hundreds of billions of dollars worth of spending into one bill, and a Federal Government on the brink ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... till he fell backwards, in mockery of him and said, "O Salih, I had thought thee a man of worth and a youth of sense, seeking naught save what was reasonable and speaking not save advisedly. What then hath befallen thy reason and urged thee to this monstrous matter and mighty hazard, that thou seekest in marriage daughters of Kings, lords of cities and climates? Say me, art thou of a rank to aspire to this great eminence and hath thy wit failed thee to this extreme pass that thou affrontest me with this demand?" Replied ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... eye. "The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre is important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your services in an intelligent, indirect way. Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... this place of ill manners? Was I not bidden engage for him a suite of apartments? Did I not duly choose these fronting on the gallery, and dispose therein the signor's baggage? And lo! an hour ago I found it all turned into the yard and this woman installed in its place. It is monstrous, unbearable! Is this an inn for travellers, or haply the ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... standing. However, I don't mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don't mean the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... obligations of filial love and duty, had declared: "Though thy father should lie before thy door, weeping and lamenting, and thy mother should show the body that bore thee and the breasts that nursed thee, see that thou trample them under foot, and go onward straightway to Christ." By this "monstrous inhumanity," as Luther afterward styled it, "savoring more of the wolf and the tyrant than of the Christian and the man," were the hearts of children steeled against their parents.(111) Thus did the papal leaders, like the Pharisees of old, make the commandment of God of none effect ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... seeing things. His success with the diamond deal had affected his brain. Of course, it was only an hallucination. The next time he looked this fantastic creation of his disordered mind would be gone. Again he glanced up in the direction of the kopjie. The apparition was still there, a horrible, monstrous, distortion of himself, standing still, speechless, staring at him. That it was only a mirage there could be no doubt. He had heard of such mirages at sea and also in the Sahara where wandering Arabs have beheld long caravans journeying ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... waking moment, is to be violently dispelled because my own son and Sir Kennington Oval have settled between them that a pretty girl is to have her own way." As I thought of it, there seemed to be a monstrous cruelty and potency in Fortune, which she never could have been allowed to exercise in a world which was not altogether given over to injustice. It was for that that I wept. I wept to think that a spirit of honesty should as yet have ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... His granaries were full, his ploughs were continually at work, his flocks covered the plains, and he maintained plenty in the country. He had a wife and two children, and the happiness of this way of life was disturbed by nothing but the devastations of a monstrous lion, which ravaged the stables and folds belonging to the peaceful cultivators of these happy regions, according to its necessities ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... face the elder boy leveled his revolver. He pulled the trigger and, before the sharp report that followed had died away, the monstrous, snake was threshing its huge ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... to do? It was necessary by some means to get her father into the canoe. To that she did not give a second thought, but while he still lived it seemed to her monstrous to take him either back to Fentown Falls or down to The Mills. Her horror of prison and of judgment for him had grown to be wholly morbid and unreasonable, just because his terror of it had been so extreme. Only one course remained. She had the chart that David Brown had given her. He had told ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... open for their entrance. It might be that the roughest and darkest side of the matter was not shown me, there being persons of eminent station and of both sexes in the party which I accompanied; and, of course, a properly trained public functionary would have deemed it a monstrous rudeness, as well as a great shame, to exhibit anything to people of rank that might too ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... absurd—monstrous!" Looking at her as she leaned back among her cushions, with her air of delicate distinction, Anstice could hardly believe the story ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive him), and yet distinct from every one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant. Yet for all this ignorance of these empty notions, they knew astronomy, and were perfectly acquainted with the motions of the heavenly bodies, and have many instruments, well contrived and divided, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... had committed in the affair of Georges were the cause which determined Bonaparte to re-establish the Ministry of Police, and to bestow it on a man who had created a belief in the necessity of that measure, by a monstrous accumulation of plots and intrigues. I am also certain that the Emperor was swayed by the probability of a war breaking out, which would force him to leave France; and that he considered Fouche as the most proper person to maintain ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of it. No sooner were the Words out of his Mouth, but he struck a Light, kindled a Torch, and set the Building in a Flame: Zadig, in the utmost Confusion, shriek'd out, and would, if possible, have prevented him from being guilty of such a monstrous Act of Ingratitude. The Hermit dragg'd him away, by a superior Force. The House was soon in a Blaze: When they had got at a convenient Distance, the Hermit, with an amazing Sedateness, turn'd back and survey'd the destructive Flames. Behold, said he, our fortunate ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... over Westchester, headquarters tripled the swarm of interceptors and observation planes. Squadrons from Connecticut and southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small end before her, the large end pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed in above, laying a smoke screen at 10,000 feet to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with the drone of jets, ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... towards the Past, a piously valiant towards the Future. What king or man had seen himself delivered from such strangling imbroglios of destruction, such devouring rages of a hostile world? And the ruin worked by them lay monstrous and appalling all round. Friedrich is now Fifty-one gone; unusually old for his age; feels himself an old man, broken with years and toils; and here lies his Kingdom in haggard slashed condition, worn to skin and bone: How is the King, resourceless, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Turkey, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, Croatia, to Trieste, occupying no day or two as in old times, but four months, a long-drawn nightmare, though a nightmare of rich happiness, if one may say so, leaving on the memory a vague vast impression of monstrous ravines, ever-succeeding profundities, heights and greatnesses, jungles strange as some moon-struck poet's fantasy, everlasting glooms, and a sound of mighty unseen rivers, cataracts, and slow cumbered rills whose bulrushes never see the sun, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... and on the third day he came to a large and spacious forest through which his road lay. Scarcely had he entered the forest when he beheld a monstrous giant dragging along by the hair of their heads a handsome knight and his lady. Jack alighted from his horse, and tying him to an oak tree, put on his invisible coat, under which he carried his ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... the gig was coming alongside, under sail, the tiller broke, and the coxswain who was steering, fell overboard. He was a good swimmer, and struck out for the ship, not thirty yards distant, while the boat fell off rapidly to the leeward. In less than half a minute, a monstrous shark rose to the surface, seized the poor fellow by the body, and carried him instantly under. Two hundred men were looking on, without the power to afford assistance. We beheld the water stained with crimson ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... tough and warm and slippery, a monstrous tail fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat purplish acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and enigmatic tendrils. The Scoop, he saw, and only half believed it, had wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... later Roman republic, the draining of the provinces by robber-governors with their publicans and sinners, the building up of monstrous fortunes without any production proper, but through usury and rapine alone: all this is made to revive again through the instrumentality of the national-economic disease called a paper crisis, in a less ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... in 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 him to ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... neighbourhood. All recommended the step, and assured him of their readiness to dine with him as often as he pleased. He was a universal favourite; and even Chuck Farthing, the gentleman jockey, with a cock-eye and a knowing shake of his head, squeaked out, in a sporting treble, one of his monstrous fudges about the Prince in days of yore, and swore that, like his Royal Highness, the young Duke made ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... monstrous sea-spider, about thirty-eight inches high, was watching me with squinting eyes, ready to spring upon me. Though my diver's dress was thick enough to defend me from the bite of this animal, I could not help ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... small responsibilities. They are not expected to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand horse-power to the factories of a monstrous town. Neither do you come to them hoping to draw out Leviathan with a hook. It is enough if they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep the groves and fields green and fresh along their banks, and offer a happy alternation of nimble rapids ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Gothic library, and his mind had labored more on the possibility of adapting some favorite bits from the baronial antiquities to modern needs than on anything so terrestrial as air. Therefore he awoke as from a dream, and taking two or three monstrous inhalations, he seized the plans and began looking over them with new energy. Meanwhile I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... vivid and wretched picture of imbecility, divided counsels, and mad hatred of God's messenger, blind refusal to see facts, and self-confidence which no disaster could abate. And, all the while, the monstrous serpent was slowly tightening its folds round the struggling, helpless rabbit. We have to imagine all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... this home of dead and gone Stephens; it was here, and he was its master. And of this they would dare to deprive him—they, an interloping trollop and a dirty little attorney! No, it couldn't be done. He clenched and unclenched his fists. It could never be done in England; but the wrong was monstrous, all the same. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... functionary—military or civil—who puts to death a fellow-creature in the course of what they are pleased to call his duty. Evidently force and bloodshed, when contrary to the interests of the possessing class, is a monstrous crime, but when it is in their favour it becomes a duty and a necessity."[1095] "We believe the 'potting' of the 'heads' of States to be a foolish and reprehensible policy, but the matter does not concern us as ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... way silently back to the cold room. Mel drew down the cover only far enough to expose the face of Alice. There was no mistake. Somehow he had been hoping that all this would turn out to be some monstrous error. But there ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... high praise, but it was deserved, and Mr. Robert Vyner would have been the first to admit it. His monstrous suspicion was daily growing less monstrous and more plausible. It became almost a conviction, and he resolved to test it by seeing Joan and surprising her with a few sudden careless remarks of the kind that a rising K.C. might spring upon ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... production and consumption, between the man and his work. It is only in the case of the largest and densest industrial cities, swollen to an unwieldy and dangerous size, that such methods of decentralisation can in some measure be applied. In these monstrous growths machinery of decentralisation may be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population over an expanded town-area will be more ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... was bled of the physician 'a very learned old man..... He afterwards acknowledg'd that he should not have bled me had he suspected ye small-pox, which brake out a day after.' As nurse he had a Swiss matron afflicted with goitre, 'whose monstrous throat, when I sometimes awak'd out of unquiet slumbers, would affright me.' But again he was spared for the work he was destined to do. 'By God's mercy after five weeks keeping my ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... everything in which I was interested, when this came to her knowledge before it did to mine. In what light, therefore, could I consider her false and mysterious conduct? What could I think of the sentiments with which she endeavored to inspire her daughter? What monstrous ingratitude was hers, to endeavor to instil it into her from whom I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... would follow; and that every place would be filled with arms, corpses, blood, and lamentation. But to what end, in the name of the eternal gods! was such eloquence directed? Was it intended to render you indignant at the conspiracy? A speech, no doubt, will inflame him whom so frightful and monstrous a reality has not provoked! Far from it: for to no man does evil, directed against himself, appear a light matter; many, on the contrary, have felt it ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... the gentleman? said Friar John. He is my man; this is the very fellow I looked for. I will send him a challenge immediately. This is, said Pantagruel, a strange and monstrous sort of man, if I may call him a man. You put me in mind of the form and looks of Amodunt and Dissonance. How were they made? said Friar John. May I be peeled like a raw onion if ever I heard a word of them. I'll tell you what I ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Hartwell's drift. Slowly, because the idea suggested appeared too monstrous to be tenable. The purple veins on his forehead were hard ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... is in this country a monstrous inequality of law and right. What is a trifling fault in the white man, is considered highly criminal—in the slave; the same offences which cost a white man a few dollars only, are punished ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... use for in our parts. I just stopped on the other side of the street and took a general survey before I attempted to go in, feeling more and more fidgety every minute, for that house just took me down with its sumptuousness. Such great windows, with one monstrous pane in a sash, and lace and silk and tassels shining through! The front was four stories high and ended off with the steepest roof you ever saw, just sloping back a trifle, and flattening off at the top, with windows in it, and all sorts of colors in the shingles, which they call "tiles" ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... not condescend to pay any attention. "I'll manage to have a fight with him in some way," said Eames to himself as he walked back through the passage of his mother's house. And Crosbie, as he settled his feet in the stirrups, felt that he disliked the young man more and more. It would be monstrous to suppose that there could be aught of jealousy in the feeling; and yet he did dislike him very strongly, and felt almost angry with Lily for asking him to come again to Allington. "I must put an ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... deep, Sailor! who dost thy vigil keep— Off the Cape of Storms dost musing sweep Over monstrous waves that curl and comb; Of thee we think when here from brink We blow the mead in ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... in my opinion is not so innocent as the gentleman from St. Helen's would have the House believe. It is on a par, indeed, with other legislation that in past years has been engineered through this legislature under the guise of beneficent law. No, not on a par. It is the most arrogant, the most monstrous example of special legislation of them all. And while I do not expect to be able to delay its passage much longer than the time I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the walls and floor is a pinkish brown, and the whole church has a warm glowing effect from its richly-coloured stone. I could have spared most, if not all, of the overladen rococo monuments to the Electors of Mainz, with their monstrous records of impossible perfections; but my companion (a German lady) thought them beautiful. The whole church struck one as rather ill-kept; perhaps the red stone floor had something to do with it. Dust and mud do not adhere somehow to an opus Alexandrinum pavement. A guide ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... The candle from the other side of the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. "He—I don't know how ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... more nor less than murder, as was that of the twelve poor fellows who were taken at Kilcowan—a brutal murder! They were perfectly justified in defending their property, and the idea of quartering them, as well as hanging them, just as if they were traitors of the worst dye, is nothing short of monstrous. ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... "Monstrous bad," was the reply. "There are large boa-constrictors in the forest suspended by their tails, waiting to gobble up travellers. You cannot travel without being covered by ants, and they sting like ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... and in despair, The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war, And by Minerva's aid a fabric reared Which like a steed of monstrous height appeared. The sides were planked with pine: they feigned it made For their return, and this the vow they paid. Thus they pretend, but in the hollow side Selected numbers of their soldiers hide; With inward arms the dire machine they load, And iron bowels stuff ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... only," said Ratcliffe, "is it true that this monstrous match is to go forward, and this very night? I heard the servants proclaim it as I was on the great staircase—I heard the directions given to clear ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... my attempts to satisfactorily analyze Winder's character and discover a sufficient motive for his monstrous conduct have been futile. Even if we imagine him inspired by a hatred of the people of the North that rose to fiendishness, we can not understand him. It seems impossible for the mind of any man to cherish so deep and insatiable an enmity against his fellow-creatures that it could not be ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... kingdom in great haste, and, after some days, came to another, where we were astonished to perceive myriads of monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads. These hideous beasts dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil, of a funnel shape, and line the sides of them with, rocks, so disposed one upon the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... desire. More than these things will she give, who looks fairer than all these things? Not while her sceptre's a snake, and her orb the red horror that rings Devilish, foul, round the world; while the hiss and the roar are the voice Of this monstrous new Queen of the May, in whose rule you would bid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... is the work of Gundulph and contemporary with the Tower of London, there seems to be no reason to doubt. Of the great part it played in English history I have already spoken. But even in ruin it impresses one as few things left to us nowadays, when everything we make is so monstrous in comparison with the work of our fathers, are able to do. To stand there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... their thoughts. He knew that they awaited the arrival of his uncle, Major Forsyth, to set the matter right. They did not seek to reconcile themselves with the idea that the break was final; it seemed too monstrous a thing to be true. James smiled, with bitter amusement, at their simple trust in the man of the world who ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... say is, then, that she ought to hob-and-nob elsewhere. They shouldn't have schooled her so monstrous high, or else bachelor men shouldn't give randys, or if they do give 'em, only ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... and so monstrous have bene the Spanishe cruelties, suche straunge slaughters and murders of those peaceable, lowly, milde, and gentle people, together with the spoiles of townes, provinces, and kingdomes, which have bene moste ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... Butt. When all these turnings and windings are thus discovered, what measure of your understandings, gentlemen, must these Defendants have taken, to imagine that you could be imposed upon by such flimsy materials as these manufactured papers? The device is gross, palpable, and monstrous. What does all this prove?—Nothing for the defendants; but then it proves a great deal against them. Recollect too, gentlemen, that this L.400, which is shewn to come out of the hands of Mr. Cochrane ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... Government.... On every one of the juries in Ireland there have been county gentlemen who have shown the greatest aptitude for business, the greatest industry, and the greatest ability; and I say it would be a monstrous thing if, by working the election of these County Councils on narrow sectarian or political lines, men of that class were excluded from the service ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... not an astonishing fact that, though on the treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths and their moral welfare or ruin, yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given, to those who will hereafter be parents? Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, or impulse, or fancy, joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and the ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... build fine houses, make fine gardens, and open fine prospects, that art should never take place of, but be subservient to, nature; and a gentleman, if confined to a situation, had better conform his designs to that, than to do as at Chatsworth, level a mountain at a monstrous expense; which, had it been suffered to remain, in so wild and romantic a scene as Chatsworth affords, might have been made one of the greatest ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... when he had to decide this question, not as the all-powerful conqueror of Pharsalus, but even before his departure for Epirus. But, while he permitted perhaps rather than originated this violation of legal order and of property, it is certainly his merit that that monstrous demand for the annulling of all claims arising from loans was rejected; and it may perhaps be looked on as a saving of his honour, that the debtors were far more indignant at the—according to their view extremely unsatisfactory—concession given to them than the injured creditors, and made under ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... shocked. The whole box must be transfixed by him, and the whole house be looking at nothing but their little circle of horror! She was ready for it. She was braced for anything but the fact which actually confronted her—that no one had noticed them at all. It was monstrous that such a thing could have been without their knowing! But there was no face in all the orchestra, the crowded galleries, or the tiers of boxes to affirm that anything had happened; no face in their own box had even stirred, but Clara's, and that had merely turned from profile to ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... difficulty because of darkness, to buy some dark green silk for embroidering a letter somewhere on my dress. Not to pander to the base in human nature are these details given but to make known life's realities to those who are blinded by theories. The frank and honest truth is never foul and monstrous. Society can be renovated only when all the facts are brought ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... bill himself. Whereupon Harry dismissed the matter then and thereafter from his thoughts, and, like a light-hearted good fellow as he was, gave himself no more trouble about his board-bills. Philip paid them, swollen as they were with a monstrous list of extras; but he seriously counted the diminishing bulk of his own hoard, which was all the money he had in the world. Had he not tacitly agreed to share with Harry to the last in this adventure, and would not the generous fellow divide; with him if he, Philip, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... physiological variety. This enormous difficulty Romanes apparently never sees, but argues as if all individuals that are infertile with the bulk of the species must be or usually are fertile with the same set of individuals or with each other. This I call a monstrous assumption, for which not a particle of evidence exists. Take this in conjunction with my argument from the severity of the struggle for existence and the extreme improbability of the respective "sexual complements" coming together ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... no better impression out of this the most famous church in the world. The deceits are too open and flagrant; the inconsistencies and contrivances too monstrous. It is hard even to sympathise with persons who receive them as genuine; and though (as I know and saw in the case of my friend at Rome) the believer's life may be passed in the purest exercise of ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it. It's monstrous that she should go on believing——" He broke off. And then, "She must be told. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were an art he had not mastered. Even he saw something funny in the preposterous coup of the half-crowns and the little boys. He did not see the monstrous absurdity of the whole policy and the whole war. He enjoyed it seriously as a crusade, that is, he enjoyed it far more than any joke can be enjoyed. Turnbull enjoyed it partly as a joke, even more perhaps as a reversion from the things he hated—modernity and monotony and civilisation. To ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... with a serpent's tail and a monstrous head, founded on a Negro type, hollow-cheeked, large-lipped, and wearing a cap made of a serpent's skin, holding a fir-cone ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... illuminated a region such as the young man had hitherto scarcely known by description. Dizzily he looked down upon what seemed a bottomless abyss at his feet. The Abbey-wall, on which he stood, built with colossal art, was but the crest or surmounting of a steep and monstrous wall of rock, which rose out of depths in which his eye could find no point on which to settle. On the other side of this immeasurable gulph lay in deep shadow—the main range of Snowdon; whose base was perhaps covered with thick forests, but whose summit ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... and pausing from time to time to peer out at them through parted boughs. Then suddenly a frightful roar was heard, immediately taken up and answered by many others, the bushes swayed as heavy bodies irresistibly forced a way through them, and some twenty monstrous figures bounded into the open and came charging down upon the little group, emitting loud, savage roars as they came, with the foam flying from ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... that you are going to marry that horrible man Mulready. It is monstrous, isn't it? I think they ought to be prosecuted and punished for such a wicked thing, and father only ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... you were setting women free for something else, I might be more melted. If you can assure me, privately and gravely, that you are setting women free to dance on the mountains like maenads, or to worship some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request. If you are quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking, will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree that the occupation is at least human and is more ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... too often made the first irksome article of a childish creed! To tell a child that it is a duty to love God better than father or mother, sisters and brothers, better than play, or stories, or food, or toys, what a monstrous thing is that! It is one of the things that make religion into a dreary and darkling shadow, that haunts the path of the innocent. The child's love is all for tangible, audible, and visible things. Love for him means ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suspicious, and kept at some distance with food in her bill; then excited by his imperative note, she flitted shyly to him, and deposited a minute caterpillar in his great gaping yellow mouth. It was like dropping a bun into the monstrous mouth of the hippopotamus of the Zoological Gardens. But the hedge-sparrow was off and back again with a second morsel in a very few moments; and again and again she darted away in quest of food and returned ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... swept the horizon with my glass, his monstrous body appeared on every side of us, except dead to windward, where there was a clear opening, towards which point we were doing our best to beat up. Even that small space appeared to be narrowing. I watched it with no little anxiety—so ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... earth resound; Blackens the waters with the rising sand. And drives vast billows to the distant land. As yawns an earthquake, when imprison'd air Struggles for vent, and lays the centre bare, The whale expands his jaws' enormous size; The prophet views the cavern with surprise; Measures his monstrous teeth, afar descried, And rolls his wond'ring eyes from side to side: Then takes possession of the spacious seat, And sails secure within the dark retreat. Now is he pleas'd the northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... worse homes, this year," Grandma said. "I'd never hold up my head if they knew back home." Along the road with the Reo ran an endless parade of old cars and trailers. There were snub-nosed Model T's, packed till they bulged; monstrous Packards with doors tied shut; yellow roadsters that had been smart ten years ago, jolting along with mattresses on their tops and young families jammed into their luggage compartments. Once in a while they met another goat, like Carrie, who wasn't giving ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... abortion of tendrils, certain cultivated varieties of Cucurbita pepo have, according to Naudin, {47} either quite lost these organs or bear semi-monstrous representatives of them. In my limited experience, I have met with only one apparent instance of their natural suppression, namely, in the common bean. All the other species of Vicia, I believe, bear tendrils; but the bean is stiff enough to support its own stem, and ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... intruded their presence in order to abuse her; and, although in reality they were but sons and subjects, they had the audacity to occupy their father's marriage-bed. At the head of this action was the dean, who with dexterity and artifice lured on the rest to consent to this monstrous deed; and because one, a racionero, would not consent, they thrust him out of the chapter-room. Government by the cabildo having been declared, it was an easy thing for this same dean to cause them to appoint him as provisor; and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... instead of exhibiting the Properties of WIT in a clearer Light, and confuting the false Claims which are made to it, he has made it his whole Business to perplex it the more, by introducing, from all Corners, a monstrous ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... it," groaned old Mr. King; "don't you see, child, after treating him so? Why, how could I? The idea is too monstrous!" He set off now at such a brisk pace down the room that Phronsie had hard work to keep up with him. But he ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... associations with his name, and by his own historic relationship to the victims of oppression, to desert the South and to frequent our woods and pastures in greater numbers, that the sensibilities of our people may be continually touched by his notes and his name, so suggestive of the monstrous lash which rules over one half of this great nation. And the anti-slavery members of the Legislature are hereby requested to seek legislative enactments whereby the whippoorwill may be further domiciliated at the North, and be provided with ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... of support you have received from us so long—that you are determined to resign the annuity we settled on you twenty years ago—to leave house, and home, and goods, and begin life anew—and this, for some secret reason or monstrous fancy which is incapable of explanation, which only now exists, and has been dormant all this time? In the name of God, under ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... be evident that such warfare as this inevitable precision of gun and rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as a whole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust and pressure of people against people. No dramatic little general spouting his troops into the proper hysterics for charging, no prancing merely brave officers, no reckless gallantry or invincible stubbornness of men will suffice. For the commander-in-chief on a picturesque horse sentimentally ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... seeing Ghatotkacha and his followers scatter in different directions and seeing those vow-observing great rishis, of ascetic wealth, viz.; Lomasa and the rest, away for bathing and collecting flowers, assumed a different form, gigantic and monstrous and frightful; and having secured all the arms (of the Pandavas) as also Draupadi, that wicked one fled away taking the three Pandavas. Thereupon that son of Pandu, Sahadeva, extricated himself with exertion, and by force snatched ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... what?—merely for an idle point of etiquette.—You cannot, I suppose, even in the workings of your romantic brain, imagine that the days of Clarissa Harlowe and Harriet Byron are come back again, when women were married by main force? and it is monstrous vanity in you to suppose that Lord Etherington, since he has honoured you with any thoughts at all, will not be satisfied with a proper and civil refusal—You are no such prize, methinks, that the days of romance are to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... member, he would be disfigured, maimed, dismembered, imperfect, next to monstrous. For his body is called his fulness, yea, the fulness of him that fills all in all. This has naturally a respect for those for whom he ever liveth to make intercession; yea, an unfathomable respect for them, because they are ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on any of the little details which force us to believe the whole story. Added to them is another genuine romantic feature, the sense of wandering in strange new lands untrodden before of man's foot; the beings who move in these lands are gracious, barbarous, magical, monstrous, superhuman, dreamy, or prophetic by turns; they are all different and all fascinating. The reader is further introduced to the life of the dead as well as of the living and the memory of his visit is one which he will retain for ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb |
