"Nightmare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Before she was fully grown, she realized that she was not sought after so much as certain friends whose fathers had greater possessions. This was terrible. It took long for her to believe that nothing counted so much as money. It made the world a nightmare, but she set to work to become her own heiress.... In this struggle she must at last lose faith. This can be brought about by long years, smashing blows and incredible suffering, but the result must be ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... but the son of that Warham Landless whom Cromwell loved, and whose old regiment is well represented here? Then will we fight in honest daylight with those who come against us—and conquer. And we will not stain our victory. Your nightmare vision of midnight butchery is naught. There will ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... fell into a fitful, feverish slumber accompanied by a nightmare in which the lashing of the wind and rain outside were conjured into the clangor and hoof beats of cavalry and he was hopelessly enmeshed ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... not taken twenty paces before the fog swallowed up the party; and henceforth they walked in a sea of mist, like men moving in a nightmare from which they cannot awake. The clammy vapour chilled them to the bone: while the unceasing wailing of seagulls, borne off the lough, the whistle of an unseen curlew on the hillside, the hurtle of wings as some ghostly bird swept over them—these were sounds ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... perhaps the most precious of all the virtues of mistletoe is that it affords efficient protection against sorcery and witchcraft. That, no doubt, is the reason why in Austria a twig of mistletoe is laid on the threshold as a preventive of nightmare; and it may be the reason why in the north of England they say that if you wish your dairy to thrive you should give your bunch of mistletoe to the first cow that calves after New Year's Day, for it is well known ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... What connection he could possibly conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the aegis-bearing Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise men shun the one at least as sedulously as they ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... dogs, now, vaguely as in a nightmare. But after a little while he began to believe that their hysterical yelping was really ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... Nightmare: A Tale for an Autumn Evening The Paper Windmill The Red Lacquer Music-Stand Spring Day The Dinner-Party Stravinsky's Three Pieces "Grotesques", for String Quartet Towns in Colour Red Slippers Thompson's Lunch Room—Grand Central Station ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... cold, winter's night and the Bard lies abed meditating upon the brevity of life, when Sleep and his sister Nightmare pay him a visit, and after a long parley, constrain him to accompany them to the Court of their brother Death. Hieing away through forests and dales, and over rivers and rocks, they alight at one of the rear portals of the City of Destruction ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... all important to the thrifty couple. It distanced the nightmare of the poor and honest,—debt. L750 was presented by Mr. Beach, in gratitude for the care of his son, to Smith. It was invested in the funds, and formed the nucleus of future savings,—'Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute' is a trite saying. 'C'est le premier pas qui gagne, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... from a hideous nightmare, sat up on a rude horsehair couch, and held his head with both hands. He was conscious of a sense of nausea, burning temples, and a general indisposition to take any interest in his surroundings. He sank back upon ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... the journey was a nightmare. The suburb through which he was passing seemed to have congealed. Save for the corner lights, there was no sign of life. The roofs and sidewalks glistened with ice. Occasionally the car struck a bump and skidded dangerously. Spike had forgotten his passenger, forgotten the restaurant, ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... is being made or repelled, the concentration of batteries in action turns the country in front of them into a nightmare of noise—'a terrific and intolerable noise' in Froissart's phrase. The incessant slamming of the guns makes it impossible to hear enemy shells coming. The first intimation is their arrival. But the orderlies go backwards and forwards through it all with superb courage. Wounded trickle down ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... nightmare of his life had been the terror of boring Elisabeth, for he was wise enough to know that a woman may love a man with whom she is angry, but never one by whom she ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... "Conciliation" meetings were kindled anew into the second and more disastrous conflagration that culminated in the proceedings of the Worcester Conference (December 6th). In the Cape Parliamentary Reports the picture of this nightmare session is to be found faithfully presented in all its ugly and grotesque details. Two facts will serve to show to what a degree the members of the Legislative Assembly of this British colony had identified themselves with the cause ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... remembered that during the Commune he was nearly killed in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise. He thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him. Then, as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized. He saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants. A catafalque contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling hand, to throw holy water on the cloth which covered the bier. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... to this imaginary charm, Sir Thomas Browne observes, in his "Vulgar Errors." "What natural effects can reasonably be expected, when, to prevent the Ephialtes, or Nightmare, we hang a hollow stone in our stables?" Grose also states, "that a stone with a hole in it, hung at the bed's head, will prevent the nightmare, and is therefore called a hag-stone." The belief in this charm still lingers in some districts, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... article by Monsieur F. Krahnstoever in the "Swiss Ski Club Year-Book for 1923" on the subject of avalanches in relation to Ski-ing. They are an everlasting nightmare to Ski runners in high places, and beginners should at once take care to learn all they can of snow-craft in order, in so far as possible, to realize what is safe and what ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... entrance a sharp spot of dazzling light sprang into being. It was an electric arc light! Somehow this apparition struck through the horror that saturated him, and he sighed as if his mind had relinquished a clinging nightmare. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... have sent my nightmare to balance the incubus of * * *'s impudent anticipation of the Apotheosis of George the Third. I should like you to take a look over it, as I think there are two or three things in it which might please ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... lived through the night; though the dawn may be gray And belated, it heralds the coming of day." So he talked with himself, and grew happy at last. The five hopeless years of his sorrow were cast Like a nightmare behind him. He walked once again With a joy in his personal life, among men. There seemed to be always a smile on his lip, For he felt like a man on the deck of a ship Who has sailed through strange seas with a mutinous crew, And now in the distance sights ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had raised the pendulum to such a giddy height that when it slipped from my impotent hands it naturally performed a long oscillation, and touched the point Despair. That was a miserable time. I hope you have never suffered what I suffered then. I lived in a perpetual nightmare—like the stupor at intoxication." He paused, as he had done before, and then, with a painfully nervous laugh, be added, "Yes, like intoxication. I drank." Suddenly a spasm seemed to pass over his face, be looked serious and sad as before, and he said, with a shudder, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... and illness, with that semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that she had upon the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare. When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements, the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the rain, and ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... of bliss when all strife and all hate will disappear from the earth, when all the crooked will be made straight, find their best explanation in this peculiarity. They console the suffering and heavy-laden for the bitter reality which, in the light of the old messianic prophecies, appears only as a nightmare, promptly to be chased away by the dawn of a new day, a new, a perfect era. The Davidic Jesus, in spite or rather because of his servile form, feels that he is himself the secret incognito king of that ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... minimum?' I gave him a brief outline of the Macroom programme. 'No rational being could object,' he said, 'but what does it mean in hard cash?' I replied, 'Roughly, four millions.' And the great Irishman—'the worst enemy that ever came to Ireland' of Mr Dillon's nightmare hours—ended the interview with these laconic words: 'The thing ought to be done and I think can be.' At the period of the session at which the Bill was introduced, the opposition of even half-a-dozen determined men could have at any stage achieved its ruin. Thanks, however, to the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... but quite drowsy. I have given her the draught as you wished, but it is singular how she objects to it. She says it only confuses her head, and gives her nightmare.' ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... rested upon the sprig of heliotrope which, with her own fingers, she had arranged in his button hole, as they had strolled down the garden together just before the start; and the faint perfume which reached her where she stood, helped her to realize that she was in the thrall of no nightmare, but that this thing had really happened. She had never loved him, she had never even pretended to love him, and it was less any sense of personal loss than the hideous sin of it which swept in upon her as she stood there looking down upon him. ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said he. "These last few days have been too much for me. I am convinced that I could not stand it any longer. It is a nightmare—a horrible nightmare—that I should be arrested as a burglar in what has been for so long my own museum. And yet I cannot blame you. You could not have done otherwise. My hope always was that I should get it all over ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... been rowelled like a horse! Ridden by the nightmare with a vengeance! And we all thought him sensible enough. Heaven send us understanding! You like to ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... now, like a dream-horde of hideous creatures seen in a nightmare, the torch-bearers had spread all through the forest at the base of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... for the new comers, and, years after, like the Sleeping Beauty, rush to life in all their pristine splendour, and find (save in the treble-gilt aodication and their own accession) the coat, the immortal coat, unchanged! The waistcoat is of a material known only to themselves—a sort of nightmare illusion of velvet, covered with a slight tracery of refined mortar, curiously picked out and guarded with a nondescript collection of the very greenest green pellets of hyson-bloom gunpowder tea. The buttons (things of use ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... men and animals at pleasure. Hence grew the belief in wizards and witches, under which millions of creatures, both young and old, were cruelly tortured and put to death. We turn over the smeared pages of this history in haste, thankful that from such a nightmare the world has ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound. And through this silence and through this waste, where the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare—a nightmare of the end of the world at ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... inward vision was lurid with the beginning of understanding of the meaning of those words, lighted up as they were by her experience of the day before, now swollen in her distraught mind to the proportions of a nightmare: "It's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman—it's not so bad once you get the hang of managing it—it's a hold on men—" Sylvia turned whiter and whiter at the glimpse she had had of what was meant by Mrs. Draper's lightly evasive "it"; a comprehension of which all ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... weary. You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange graft of western energy. Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood. Your voice is weary. "There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among the owners no cooperation. It is like—like working in a nightmare, here in China. It drags at me, it drags".... You bow me out with great civility. The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living iridescent streams ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... was even longer. It included going to church every other Sunday: keeping his Sunday shoes blacked: not forgetting to change his collar every morning: to get his hair cut at least once in six weeks: not to eat pie just before going to bed, "because you know if you do, you always have the nightmare and groan and moan and wake up everyone but yourself": not to say "Jumpin'" or "Creepin' Judas" any oftener than he could help: to be sure and not cut prices in the store just because a customer asked him to do so—and ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... people who know how to travel," said he, "and people who don't. These lost muttons here don't, and they make hotel-keeping a nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them the way to Notre Dame. Pouah!" said he, gulping down his disgust and the rest of his Armagnac, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... day, I am sure that driver's worst nightmare is when he lives over again the time when he took a tenderfoot and his wife into Jackson's Hole, and, but for the tenderfoot, would have made them stay out overnight, wet, famished, frozen, within a stone's throw of the very house for which ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... enthrone Mephistopheles in a chair, give him a feather brush for a sceptre, and offer him a broken crown, which he is to glue together with 'sweat and blood.' It is like some horrid nightmare. We feel as if we were going mad; and so does Faust himself. But suddenly he catches sight of a magic mirror, in which he sees a form of ravishing beauty—not that of Gretchen or Helen, but some form of ideal loveliness. He ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... chap, to think of having you by the hand again! I feel as though we were both aboard that German liner, and all that's happened since a nightmare. I thought that time ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... I be able to bear your going out again? It will be like a horrible nightmare. And perhaps all we've both gone through may ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... the whole the affair of the previous night had been less odious than Caroline had feared. Still it had been rather like an ugly nightmare, all the same—Uncle Creddle banging on the door until one startled woman opened it while the other peered over the banisters. They had thanked Mr. Creddle, saying Caroline ought to be more careful: and Mrs. Bradford added that some burglar ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the bridge. He took it as a portent, almost a menace, he knew not of what. He might have foreseen that unhappy eventuality, and prevented it, but his brain refused to work clearly that morning. A terrible and bizarre crime had bemused his faculties. He seemed to be in a state of waking nightmare. ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... attention ever on the alert. That it failed to win the suffrages of the public was certainly due to no demerit in the work. Many causes may have conspired against it. The public taste had long been debauched by novels of that nightmare school in which Mrs Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis were the leaders. Moreover, in the very year in which "The Wanderer" was published, appeared the first of a series of works of fiction which, by their power and novelty, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Iroquois "the scourge of this infant church." They burned, hacked, and devoured the neophytes; exterminated whole villages at once; destroyed the nations whom the Fathers hoped to convert; and ruined that sure ally of the missions, the fur-trade. Not the most hideous nightmare of a fevered brain could transcend in horror the real and waking perils with which they beset the path ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... head again, with the spirit of a true British tradesman, as soon as the nightmare of traitorous plots and contraband imports was over. Captain Tugwell on his behalf led the fishing fleet against that renegade La Liberte, and casting the foreigners overboard, they restored her integrity ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... which Dr. Henner had recommended to me, and which we were now going to see. It was called "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," and was a "futurist" production, a strange, weird freak of the cinema art, supposed to be the nightmare of a madman. "Being an American," said Dr. Henner, "you will find yourself asking, 'What good does such a picture do?' You will have the idea that every work of art must serve some moral purpose." After a pause, he added: ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... last time he should set foot on British soil. In Ammonius's house of Saint Stephen's Chapel at Westminster on 9 April 1517, the ceremony of absolution took place, ridding Erasmus for good of the nightmare which had oppressed him since his youth. At last he ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... attention to some celebrity then passing out. She raised her glass, but her hand fell nerveless in her lap. Immediately following him came Dr. Kemp. Their eyes met, and he bowed low, passing on immediately. The rest of the evening passed like a nightmare; she heard nothing but her heart-throbs, saw nothing but his beloved face regarding her with simple courtesy. Louis knew that for her the opera was over; the tell-tale bistrous shadows grew around her eyes, and she became ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... speaking all together, waving their arms, their faces white under the moon, their eyes large and frightened like the eyes of little children. He tried to push their babel off from him. He could not understand.... Was this a continuation of the nightmare of the afternoon? There was a roar just behind their ears as it seemed. They saw a light flash upon the sky and fade, flash again and fade. With their faces towards the horizon ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... juncture, no happier man than Colonel and State Senator Joseph Woods can be found. His mines are unfailing in their yield; his bachelor bungalow, in its splendor, will extinguish certain ambitious rivals, and he is freed from the nightmare of investigating the tangled web of the mysterious struggle for the millions of Lagunitas. He is confirmed in his resolve ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at the conclusion of such a nightmare interview. "But I must get to my plew- stilts." And he would seclude himself as usual in his back room, and Archie go forth into the night and the city ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a nightmare; a nightmare is usually a muddled kind of thing with no connections at all; it is a dream turned into a blasphemy. The book may mean several things; it is quite possible that it may mean nothing; there is no need for a novel to mean anything so long as it is readable. 'The Man who was Thursday' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... these kings we embrace you yet once more With all forgiveness, all oblivion, And trust, not love, you less. And now, O sire, Grant me your son, to nurse, to wait upon him, Like mine own brother. For my debt to him, This nightmare weight of gratitude, I know it; Taunt me no more: yourself and yours shall have Free adit; we will scatter all our maids Till happier times each to her proper hearth: What use to keep them here—now? ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the bewildered young man. This was the maddest theory of all. His head swam with a riot of conflicting impressions. He seemed to have been hurled headlong into a frightful nightmare, and he longed to emerge again into the light ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... that obsession lifted like the passing of a nightmare; and with a start, a little shiver and a sigh, Lanyard roused and went on to do the bidding of his Self for ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... progressed, growing more and more of a nightmare to me. It was not Worcester's day. The umpire could not see straight; the boys grumbled and fought among themselves; Spears roasted the umpire and was sent to the bench; Bogart tripped, hurting his sore ankle, and had to be taken ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... ye up jest as fast as feet c'd travel, an' I never spected to be so thankful for knowin' a perlece officer ez I be ter-day. My!' catching her breath and hurrying on; 'if I couldn't 'a' seen to gittin' them wretches arristed afore night, I'd 'a' had a nightmare sure, an' never slep' ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... loved the Bourgeois so! It seems like a hideous dream of fright and nightmare that Le Gardeur should assail the father of Pierre Philibert, and mine that was ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... The awful nightmare continued. Men were coming and going. Reserves were being rushed forward; more bombs were being sent up. The Bosche artillery quietened down a bit, but only, as I found out immediately afterwards, to allow their bombers to attack. I could see the flash of hundreds ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... fancies of the noblest race that ever adorned the earth, compared with whose mythology the Christian system is a hideous nightmare. The Roman gods wear a sterner look, befitting their practical and imperial worshippers, and Jove himself is the ideal genius of the eternal city. The deities of the old Scandinavians, whose blood tinges our English veins, were fierce and warlike as themselves, with ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... dream," said Bertram. "General Bertram not my father! Whose son am I then? What is my name? Who am I? Good God, sir, speak! Get me out of this horrible nightmare." ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... fragile piece of beauty. In this hall heavy with torch smoke, and the sweat of many soldiers, in this ring of blood-stained weapons and smouldering eyes, she appeared like a delicate dreamer enveloped by a nightmare. Yet even the long stare of Lapo Cercamorte she answered with a ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... rich and powerful, and possessing limitless prospects of increased power and riches. Yet am I ready to sacrifice everything, to brave everything, to bring utter ruin on my fortune, if only I can rid myself of this nightmare of shame. Is this ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is now quite a pleasant walk. Rations and carrying parties, though they have developed a rather peculiar gait, can progress at a reasonable pace, and have no need to wade so long as they keep to the boards. On either side, however, we still have a reminder of the nightmare that is past. The possibility of getting material up has a corresponding effect on the work in the trenches. The trench we were in on December 9th, which we could not conceive ever being anything but a drain, has now found its proper use. It has a new C.T. behind, and breastworks pushed out in front ...
— Short History of the London Rifle Brigade • Unknown
... infernal impertinence to giggle and gag, blast them! I heard them. I could have screamed. I tried to stop them; and the stage-manager swore at me in the wings, and the scene-shifters laughed. It was a hideous nightmare. The audience laughed—the sound of it is in my ears now, and it tortures me, for it was not natural laughter. It was not spontaneous—how could it be so? It was simply part of this iniquitous conspiracy to ruin me. It was hired mockery, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... long I remained in this position, nor yet when I came to myself. All was a dream to me, a nightmare of horrid whirlings and infinite oppressions. The faces of the folk that watched, the garmentry of the Bishop and his priests, the red robes of the young Duke and his assessors, spun round ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... enough if she had a nightmare or a morning mare, or something of that sort, and could see a thing like that," exclaimed Castellan, gripping the Lieutenant-Commander by the shoulder with his right hand, and pointing to the east with ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... bright and blinding overhead, surrounded by reddish clouds, glaring down on the fairy city. The sky was—blotchy. It was daylight, but through the clouds bright stars were shining. A corner of the horizon was winter blue; a whole sweep of it was dead, featureless black. It was a nightmare sky, an impossible sky. Dave's eyes bulged ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... another in a sort of competitive examination and, after deciding the number of applications they can pass on the basis of the volume of resources which they can devote to the future, award the places to those which head the list." Such a prospect is a nightmare of officialism and delay. You would be driven to formulate a simple, intelligible rule or measure, and leave that rule to be applied by the unfettered judgment of innumerable men to individual problems, as and when they arose. And for such a rule or ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... boulders, and scrambling with their adhesive, spongy feet over places which would have been impossible for horses. Among the broken rocks those behind could sometimes only see the long, undulating, darting necks of the creatures in front, as if it were some nightmare procession of serpents. Indeed, it had much the effect of a dream upon the prisoners, for there was no sound, save the soft, dull padding and shuffling of the feet. The strange, wild frieze moved slowly and silently onwards amid a setting of black stone ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... again, and even worse, because of their contrast with the past I'd conjured up. Grief for the death of Jimmy Beckett mingled with grief for Brian, and anxieties about money, in the dull, sickly way that unconnected troubles tangle themselves together in nightmare dreams. ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would have been impossible to regain if we had run past the northern end. The course was laid on our scrap of chart for a point some thirty miles down the coast. That day and the following day passed for us in a sort of nightmare. Our mouths were dry and our tongues were swollen. The wind was still strong and the heavy sea forced us to navigate carefully, but any thought of our peril from the waves was buried beneath the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... irresponsibility was beginning to possess his jaded spirit. He made a little money occasionally, but he was no longer expected to hand anything over when the first of the month came round—a date that had haunted him like a nightmare for four long years. Pie could spend it on himself, and he felt an. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... cannot say why, excepting that I trusted so entirely in Dr. Thorndyke—and it is so horrible and, above all, so dreadfully suggestive of what may happen. Up to now the whole thing has seemed like a nightmare—terrifying, but yet unreal. But now that he is actually in prison, it has suddenly become a dreadful reality and I am overwhelmed with terror. Oh! poor boy! What will become of him? For pity's sake, Dr. Jervis, tell me what ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... was spending surpluses upon internal improvement. The disturbed Irrigation Department was vivifying the land. The derided army held the frontier against all comers. Astonishment gave place to satisfaction, and satisfaction grew into delight. The haunting nightmare of Egyptian politics ended. Another dream began—a bright if vague vision of Imperial power, of trans-continental railways, of African Viceroys, of conquest and commerce. The interest of the British people in the work of regeneration ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... was long enough for their patriotism to receive a shock. It was some time fortunately since the conduct of public affairs had wanted for men of disinterested ability, but the extraordinary documents concealed (of all places in the world—it was as fantastic as a nightmare) in a "bargain" picked up at second-hand by an obscure scribbler, would be a calculable blow to the retrospective mind. Baron saw vividly that if these relics should be made public the scandal, the horror, the chatter would be immense. Immense would be also the contribution to truth, the rectification ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... ever occurred in my dreaming experience before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors of nightmare. But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the landscape ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... more than sick of the war. They gave us three blankets between us, and we lay on the cushions placed on the floor, and used the rugs to cover us both. After some months of mother earth this unusual bed gave me a nightmare, and I woke the sergeant to tell him that the mules were trampling on us, which much amused him. These worthy but tactless animals were tethered to the waggon, and pulling and straining on it all the time, which I suppose accounted ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... to cry out that I would not be a priest, but I could not speak; my tongue seemed nailed to my palate, and I found it impossible to express my will by the least syllable of negation. Though fully awake, I felt like one under the influence of a nightmare, who vainly strives to shriek out the one word ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... ashen-lipped brother and the sister, not yet recovered from her collapse, had months for realization; nightmare months during which hordes of creditors arose with legitimate, but wolf-like, hunger from everywhere, and courts adjudicated and the world learned that not a remnant of shredded fortune nor a ragged banknote would remain to the family which had ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... "This means nightmare, and physic in the morning," said the worthy woman. "Now, don't you fret and worry your dear head, Miss Helen, pet. Oh, yes, I know all about it, and it was a naughty thing to do, only children will be children. Your aunt needn't expect that her old crabbed head and ways will ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... was not a sound. It was sickening, like a nightmare, in which suddenly something gives way beneath you, and you feel yourself sinking, sinking, down into bottomless abysses. As if in a flash of lightning they saw themselves—victims of a relentless ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... mentioned this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as 'poor Jemmie,' was at any ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... better be getting along home to bed!" agreed the other man, coming forward and slipping his arm under the older man's. "I'll tuck you up, my old friend, with a good hot toddy inside you, and let you sleep off this outrageously crazy daylight nightmare you've cooked up for yourself. And don't wake up with the fate of the Japanese factory-hand sitting on your chest, or you'll get ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... mother-in-law looks to me like something in petticoats that comes creeping up with a catlike tread, carrying in one hand a net and in the other a bale-hook. I can't sit out two dances with a debutante before this nightmare is looking over my shoulder, grinning like a gargoyle and counting up the number of millions you are ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... interest on it. Well, sir, it's got to be so bad that it annoys me terribly. It keeps me awake at night. I'm losing flesh. That man and his poetry haunt me. I'm getting gloomy and morose. Life is beginning to pall upon me. I seem to be under the influence of a perpetual nightmare. I can't stand it much longer, Mr. Grady; my reason will totter upon its throne. Here, only this morning, he sent me a poem entitled "Lines to Hannah." Are you ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... what they had gone through, that Drayton should be standing there, telling him that there was nothing in it, that there never had been any miserable business, that it was all a storm in a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the whole dirty nightmare to nothing with the laughter that was like Nicky's ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... there are three points here. In the first place—if I do not misapprehend Mr. Asquith's drift—in working for the abolition of militarism, we are working for a great diminution in those armaments which have become a nightmare to the modern world. The second point is that we have to help in every fashion small nationalities, or, in other words, that we have to see that countries like Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... for those men out there," said Paul, "it would all be like a dream, a nightmare, driven away ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed; for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature, to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... he tried to picture the wild scene that had followed. That furious scamper through the wooded part of the island must remain pretty much in the nature of a nightmare with ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... Protestantism. The limbs of his Venus are more thorough theses than those which the German monk pasted on the church door of Wittenberg. Then it was that men felt as if suddenly freed from the force and pressure of a thousand years; the artists, most of all, again breathed freely as the nightmare of Christianity seemed to spin whirling from their breasts, and they threw themselves with enthusiasm into the sea of Greek joyousness from whose foam rose to them goddesses of beauty. Painters once more limned the ambrosial joys of Olympus; sculptors carved, with the joy of yore, old ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a letter which did not reach its destination till after the Duchess's death. Scott himself heard of her death by chance when they landed for a few hours on the coast of Ireland; he was quite overpowered by the news, and went to bed only to drop into short nightmare sleeps, and to wake with the dim memory of some heavy weight at his heart. The Duke himself died five years later, leaving a son only thirteen years of age (the present Duke), over whose interests, both as regarded his education and his estates, Scott watched as jealously as ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... stood with his viper head stretched out, in such an attitude as a painter would choose for Mephistopheles. The three covetous beings, thirsting for gold as devils thirst for the dew of heaven, looked simultaneously, as it chanced, at the owner of all this wealth. Some nightmare troubled Pons; he stirred, and suddenly, under the influence of those diabolical glances, he opened his ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... time. ("L.L." I. page 35.) But most of the other Edinburgh lectures were "intolerably dull," "as dull as the professors" themselves, "something fearful to remember." In after life the memory of these lectures was like a nightmare to him. He speaks in 1840 of Jameson's lectures as something "I... for my sins experienced!" ("L.L." I. page 340.) Darwin especially signalises these lectures on Geology and Zoology, which he attended in his second year, as being worst of all "incredibly dull. The sole ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... He stopped. A nightmare sound, as discordant as it was ear-splitting, filled the room. Miss Greene sank back into her chair, suddenly white. One of the young men let a cup of tea fall neatly from his fingers on to the floor and there crash into fragments. The young lady visitor emitted a scream that would have done credit ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... on like one in a nightmare. His feet grew heavy like lead, he panted and gasped, his breath came hot and dry in his throat. But still he ran and ran until at last he found himself in front of old Matt Abrahamson's cabin, gasping, panting, and sobbing for breath, ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... too, at Lynchburg, who sent me his "regards." Poor fellow! He says he still has "dreams"! He told her a few, but she says they were chiefly about meeting me at a ball, when I always treated him with the most freezing coldness. The same old nightmare. How often he has told me of that same dream, that tormented him eighteen months ago. He says he often thinks of me now—and he still "dreams" of me! "Dreams are baseless fabrics whose timbers are mere ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... package). Throw it in the waste basket, Eddie. This is from Warren. I know the handwriting. It looks like a hat. (Opens box and removes wrappings, disclosing a hideous red and orange hat.) Heavens, what a nightmare! Red and orange and a style four years old. It must have come from the five and ten cent store. Look ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... were mostly dark, and from the black ridges occupied by the enemy came with a swish and a roar red tongues of flame and the spitting, splitting fury of bursting steel, which produced in the mind of those who had recently been folded in the arms of Morpheus a sensation as of fevered nightmare or threatened madness. But the sturdy soon attuned themselves to the terrific reality, though for some days, while the midnight cannonading continued, many of the more nervous were well-nigh distraught. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... feeling, a waking nightmare. He sank exhausted into John Jardine's arms, panting ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... as though in another moment he would tumble back again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X—— indeed was fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they largely resembled one another, large deserted ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, his face streaming with anguished tears, he forced ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... second the idea of being alongside a quay came to her with nightmare effect, heightened by a ruffling and booming from the sky above, a rippling and flapping and thundering like the sound of ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy |
